News and Guidelines

I have come across this issue a number of times in the past and more recently forgot this could be a root cause - so want to share the knowledge and also link my uservoice suggestion to this post... ScenarioSomeone in the company wants to add a suggestion to the suggestion scheme.  This could be sensitive or not, so the permissions are determined for each suggestion in the workflow.  For those that are not sensitive, the suggestion is open to all.  For those that are sensitive, the suggestion is open only to the investigating team. IssueThe suggestion goes through an approval route.  It is first assigned to a team of reviewers (SharePoint group) who can approve and choose an "Investigator" using a people picker on the approval task.  This updates the underlying list item, completes the review task and assigns an investigation task to the selected investigator.Note - this workflow was developed by a previous analyst who has since left the company, so was picked up by myself when an issu

One of the most exciting announcements with the latest drop from the product teams this month would have to be "Execute SQL" from O365 no less..http://help.nintex.com/en-US/O365/Default.htm#O365WorkFlow/Workflow%20Actions/Execute%20SQL.htmYES, this means you can execute SQL from the SharePoint Online platform to your internally hosted SQL servers. This does have some caveats though. Note: The database must be internet-accessible.For this post I'm going to connect to my Azure SQL server.. Ok so first of all get your DB setup with some tables.. I used this to get me started. Getting started with SQL Database - AzureI was then able to use SQL Server Management Studio to connect to the server and check out the tables etc.. Heading into Nintex Workflow for O365, and adding the "Execute SQL" action to the canvas we can get into configuring it.. Now if you are familiar with the "Execute SQL" action with the Nintex Workflow for SharePoint (2007, 2010, 2013) this is pretty much the same to conf

Hello world and welcome to my first blog of 2020! My oh my, this year I am so thrilled to share some great technical content that will showcase features, updates and new releases to the Nintex platform. Now before I dive in, I wanted to take moment to give a BIG shout out to my fellow colleagues that make up the Presales team here at Nintex: burked, DocFather_Ray, MMachado, DavidStephen,  JohnHernandez,  john_armstrong, katie_chu, ryan_oleary, MattHSpears, simpson and vadim_tabakman. Our team had a combined 27,544 views on blog post for 2019…way to go team!!!!!!!!!!!!!! To kick off this year with a bang, our product team will be releasing something new in Nintex Promapp, known as the "Checklist" Who: This will be beneficial to the organizations who are worried about process compliance and auditing, but have no way to capture that tasks have been completed in a timely fashion and currently have no process automation initiatives within their organizations. What: The checklist will operat

Hello, In this blog I'll walk through taking an existing Nintex Form for Office365 that publishes to a list and extract that data from the Sharepoint list into a document using Nintex DocGen.  Hopefully you found that video helpful! Please leave me your thoughts below or reach out on twitter! @sayhellotoryan  Cheers,Ryan

Hello, In this blog I'll walk through taking an existing Nintex Form for Office365 that publishes to a list and extract that data from the Sharepoint list into a document using Nintex DocGen.  Hopefully you found that video helpful! Please leave me your thoughts below or reach out on twitter! @sayhellotoryan  Cheers,Ryan

 Moving to the cloud can be a daunting task for even the most seasoned SharePoint users and administrators, however now more than ever the benefits now far outweighs the effort required. Cloud services have seen a huge uptick in recent years as more and more organizations move workflows from costly on-premises solutions to managed cloud services. This session on moving to Office 365 and SharePoint Online with Nintex will provide an overview of the migration process broken down into three main parts: Planning your SharePoint migration with Nintex Understanding some of the technical considerations you should know before moving to the cloud Reviewing the capability differences between Nintex for SharePoint On-Prem and Nintex for Office 365 Make sure to check out the resources at the bottom of the post after you've watched the session!   Resources:Nintex Migration WhitepaperNintex for Office 365 Best PracticesUsing the Know Your Workflow Script for Migration PlanningNintex Live for Office

What steps can be taken to improve accessible experience on Nintex Forms?Tab Based Forms Create Tab like functionality on your Nintex Forms Tab-based Layout Solution Creating Tabs in Nintex Forms  An example of making Nintex Forms elements focus-able with tab-index and JavaScript?InFORMed: Customize Your Nintex Forms JavaScript Events in Nintex Forms Manage focus on a form using keyboard commands or key handlers?Shortcut Keys for Forms Design Shortcut Keys Create Custom Form Controls Create a Custom Form Control Sample  How can we add WAI-ARIA authoring practices (roles or states) to Nintex Forms HTML markup for screen readers?Examples dMAX AP Automation for Nintex Workflow and Forms A Different Approach for Task Notifications Location Controls Set image based on location in Forms Location Documentation  Best practices to manage keyboard focus when using dialog boxes within Nintex Forms?Using JavaScript would be the best route JavaScript events in Nintex Forms  Horizontal fields

With the encroaching end of a major effort I have been a part of for the better part of this year, the time has come to look back and review all the things that were encountered and see if they could have been done better. I wanted to take a moment and share something that was asked of me mid-way through this project and changed how I approached the workflow. A Bit of BackgroundAt the core, this is nothing more than an approval process. That said, it goes through 9 different approvals ranging from service reps, to field reps, to engineers looking at installed equipment. In total, there are 5 different groups that have to touch this and within each of those groups, it may be assigned to a different user depending on geo-location. So you may already see where I am taking this, but the issue that arose is how can we assign a task to someone but allow for someone else to jump in and take over? Delegation right? Well delegation requires the assigned user to do the delegation. What happens i

With the release of the Nintex Workflow for Office 365 Web Request action, it opens a whole new world of functionality to your Nintex Workflows.  SharePoint online still exposes a number of ASMX web web services.  You can now call those web services and get the data or update data as you need it. Not only can you call ASMX web services, but you can also perform HTTP GETs, POSTs, PUTs and you can also build your own HTTP packets for your requests. In this post, you'll see how to make a call to an ASMX web service.  Specifically, the SharePoint Lists.asmx web service, in order to call the GetList web method. This is what the Web Request action looks like :Calling an ASMX Web Service You can build up the url dynamically, using common properties, or for testing, you can simply put in the entire URL.eg. http://mysite.sharepoint.com/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx Once that is placed in the URL field, you can choose the appropriate Method.  Usually, either SOAP 1.1 or SOAP 1.2 for ASMX web services.  In

Credit where credit is due, this was inspired in part by Michael's post of similar nature using Nintex for Salesforce and Drawloop, find it here.  IntroductionSometimes when creating a botflow in Nintex RPA, you might be required to interact with a website or application that isn’t ‘behaving’ as you might expect it to. Maybe the bullseye is pulling out too much when you drop it, or maybe it isn’t pulling out enough, or there is a list you need to iterate through but it isn’t contained in a table. There are all examples where using Excel as the middle-man can help out. You might be questioning “Why use Excel? Why not Notepad or internal variables?”. The simple answer is that this is just the method I prefer. Nintex RPA has some really great interactions baked in that make working with Excel super easy. Sure you could use Notepad to accomplish the same goal, but then you’d be relegated to using directional arrow keystrokes to navigate around, Notepad’s find function, etc. It is 100% poss

You have a bunch of manual processes and the road may be long to complete and automate everything the way you want. So, do you add a temporary fix in the short term? Is the calorie burn even worth it? Maybe it’s better to just focus on the greater goal and leave everything manual. A family pet makes a mistake on the carpet. You know you need to clean it up. In some cases, you need to rip and replace the carpet. Instead you cover it up until you decide on the path best taken. This is what I call "Newspaper Automation". By covering the stain with newspaper, I fixed it right? My wife would not agree but she isn't writing this article. In regards to automation sometimes adding a small fix can be a big change. For example, I had a customer that wanted to generate contracts out of their Salesforce environment and get them eSigned. They were not aware of Nintex Workflow Cloud. SIDE NOTE: Nintex Workflow Cloud or NWC can handle many contract focused use cases such as...Redlining Approvals Rout

Is your organization looking to move your content and processes to the Microsoft Cloud? As more and more companies start the planning and migration process, they struggle with the numerous choices and decisions that need to be made on getting there as well as realizing all the benefits moving to the cloud can bring.Gig Werks a Premier Nintex Partner and Microsoft Gold Partner, will be hosting an upcoming webcast to help guide you on that journey and deliver the information you need to make the right choices and setup your organization for a successful migration, end-user adoption and realizing the full potential the cloud and Nintex has to offer.During the webcast, we will discuss best practices to move to the Microsoft Cloud and how to apply process using Nintex Workflow. Topics include:   Which Microsoft Cloud Platform to use? (SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Azure Blob Storage) From Feature, to Governance to Price How do you move that content as well as all the workflows, processes an

A very common ask amongst the Nintex Workflow Cloud community has been a landing page for users to be able to review and complete tasks without being granted full rights to access the workflow designer. Up until our most recent release, the best way to accomplish this was building a custom landing page using our extensive Task API's. While this was a workable solution for many customers, feedback skewed towards keeping this page within a customer's Nintex Workflow Cloud tenant on a Nintex Hosted landing page. With that feedback in mind, we have rolled out the Participant Task Experience in Nintex Workflow Cloud! Before we go through what this looks like, there are a few considerations that we need to cover. The user will need to be added to the Nintex Workflow Cloud Tenant as a participant** The user will need to be part of your domain If a user is not a part of your domain, they will not be able to sign in to the new Participant Experience Users will still be able to access / respond

Nintex Highlights for 2019 For all of the amazing customers and partners of Nintex, this blog is dedicated to you! It's hard to believe that the last few days of 2019 is upon us. If you're like me you are probably scratching your head like where did the year go? Even though the year is coming to an end, I figured it would only be appropriate to recap some of the amazing accomplishments on the Nintex platform during 2019: Before I begin this blog, I would like to pay homage to our Nintex family member Tom Castiglia. Tom was a man of faith, compassion, and excitement for Nintex. You are missed my friend, and will always be remembered! January: Nintex hit the ground running, with our HUGE announcement on a strategic partnership with Adobe to bring new native electronic signature capabilities, called  Nintex Sign Powered by Adobe Sign. For more information on this blockbuster release, please visit: https://news.nintex.com/2019-01-24-Nintex-Announces-Nintex-Sign-Powered-by-Adobe-Sign Februa

I was asked to create a workflow to send a reminder email to all the manager's that have time cards yet to be reviewed by them. I want to send only one email, even if they had more than one time card to review. This is a SITE workflow. This way I can schedule it to run when I want. You can schedule it to run at what ever interval you desire. List or Library workflows work best when set up to run when something is created or modified. First set up your variables.  This is what my workflow looks like.  Configure your first query: I filtered by the status of Submitted as they are ready for review but not yet reviewed.Select your "Collection" variable. Next, use a Collection operation to remove the duplicates Configure the For each Next we want set a variable to find the Manager's User ID so we can filter it later.  We will query this list again. This time filtering so the list Column (manager) and the Variable match up. Now I want to send a notice to each manager based on this query. You

What is Nintex Workflow Cloud (NWC)?It’s a state-of-the-art cloud workflow capability that lets you easily extend and connect your forms, applications, content, and systems of record, with the people who make the decisions your business relies upon to succeedNintex Workflow Cloud empowers anyone in your organization to unlock the transformational business benefits of humancentric workflow automation. Why Nintex Workflow Cloud?Four main key factors that determine why should be used NWC:EASY Hit the ground running fast with a cloud-based solution that removes upfront setup and costs. Drag-and-drop to design and build workflows the way you think – in a fewclicks, not code.       Connect structured and unstructured content sources, from legacy systems to modern SaaS apps. HUMAN-CENTRIC Empower the people closest to lines of business to automate the processesthat are your business.         Bring the right content, at the right time, to the right people. Share the workflow innovations your p

It was a busy conference for Nintex in Chicago. Technical Evangelist, Terry Simpson had to juggle a lot of things.  He started off with a 2 hour workshop that focused on Process Mapping with the Nintex Promapp tool.  If you haven't seen it, it's definitely time to take a look.   Wednesday, Terry had a session named Art of the Possible: Automation Demystified.  This was a technical deep dive into the tools that businesses can use to help their automation needs, with specific focus on time saving and increasing productivity. Thursday, a session on Clicks not Code.  Here, Terry focused on the ease of use of automation tools like Nintex Forms, Workflow and Promapp and the lack of need for coding.  Essentially, empowering the business users. The booth was also really busy.  Since the event was a mix of regulars and first timers, conversations varied quite a lot.  Between the current hot topic of Teams, Forms, Workflow automation, Robotic Process automation and understanding your processes,

See post on SimplifyingProcesses.com Execute your BPM plan and establish continuous improvementAs a quick recap – in Part One of this blog series, I suggested that digital transformation efforts can often be derailed by an organization’s lack of process knowledge. I followed by positioning business process management (BPM) to better understand, capture, and manage process knowledge. Then, in Part Two, I identified the three-phase approach organizations can follow to implement BPM (1. Planning – 2. Execution – 3. Continuous Improvement) and went on to exposit the Planning phase. Now, in my final post in this series, I’ll detail the key steps for successful BPM Execution and Continuous Improvement. ExecutionThe Execution phase can be broken up into five subsections. First, we must have a clear understanding of the scope of the project. Second, the scope of work must be prioritized based on objective factors understandable to the stakeholders involved in the project. Thirdly, we must recr

I recently attended the Dreamforce event in San Francisco. While there and speaking with new/current customers... something became clear. There is an AMAZING feature that is not commonly used by our current customers. I was completely shocked when folks were so excited to hear about a feature they already have (not an add-on) they are not using that could completely remove manual tasks for their users while also keeping your Salesforce data live and accurate. This feature is called INSERT-UPDATE. I have added a link to the setup of this feature at the bottom of this article. "What is this feature? Why do I care?" Great Question! Insert-Update will allow a Document Generation Package (at the beginning of creation or the end) to update your Salesforce data model. Why you care is really a creative answer. You can update ANYTHING. You can create Tasks. So, if you have a use-case where you create proposals you can have the insert update assign a task to the current user that ran it for exam

The initial release of the online version of the Nintex RPA and Nintex RPA Central documentation is now available. This release represents the beginning of 100% online documentation availability and the ability to continuously update the documentation with the latest information. This release of the Nintex RPA online help documentation features:Information for using Nintex RPA Quick start information for the new Nintex RPA Central  Installation information for Nintex RPA Additionally, the following efforts are taking place to modernize the Nintex online help documentation across all platforms: Customer interviews to collect feedback about what you believe is important and useful in product documentation. Peer reviews to help create a consistent user experience across the Nintex platform help documentation. Internal expert reviews to ensure the accuracy of the content of the documentation. So take a moment and become familiar with the documentation home for all of your Nintex platform p

I was trying to find a simple way to get an Employee's Manager in a People field on a form.  You can use a Calculated Field to display the Manager but I couldn't connect that directly to a People column.  Also, in some cases, the Manager a person reports to is not always the Manager in their User Profile, so I wanted to give users the ability to select the appropriate manager as an alternative option. I found a few posts that used JavaScript to do this, but they seemed needlessly complicated.  I used People Picker Extensions and JavaScript events in Nintex Forms as references and came up with a simpler solution (also, I'm using Nintex Forms Enterprise version 1.12.2.20).  First, I added a People Field for the Employee:Formula: Current User Store Client ID in JavaScript variable: Yes Client ID JavaScript variable name: EmployeeSecond, I added a People Field for the Manager:Default Value Source: Use connected field's default value Store Client ID in JavaScript variable: Yes Client ID Jav

Have You ever had the situation in Forms Designer that the minimal width of a list lookup control is too big for your form? In this example I wanted to insert a list lookup for 'unit of measure' to the right of the 'quantity' field.But the width of the inserted control is too big and I could not shrink it in Forms Designer. What to do?CSS is your friend. Assign a class name to the control, e.g. 'measure' and enter a little piece of CSS in the form settings:Now the form looks as exspected:You have to play with the number of pixels for width und position. For the width its important to use '!important' in CSS!I think you can use this also for other controls. Hope that helps someone Manfred

Mistakes happen, change is needed, so you need to make sure you’re supported when it is. We hope the Nintex Workflow Generator reduces these incidents of change by adding better compliance pre build but when you need to rollback or simply track the history, introducing Nintex Workflow Cloud Version History.For the most part, version history is fairly self-explanatory. It’s a history of all your workflow version events, Saved (minor) or Published (major). What it does give you is control over storing, tracking and restoring your Nintex workflow cloud workflows, as well as enforce auditing of changes using comments.Workflow SettingsBut first let’s tackle the small configuration setting required. Under Settings – Workflow Settings there are two simple on/off options regarding whether to make comments compulsory for both a workflow save event and a workflow publish event.Save EventClicking Save on a workflow will display a prompt to enter Version Comments. Note, this popup will only displa

This is a brief blog to overview the migration tools that work for Nintex. For more information about migrations, please visit the Nintex Migration Center. How to Approach a Migration with Nintex?Before a migration, perform an inventory of what processes you have that should be migrated. Run the Know Your Workflow script to gather as much information as possible to help make smart transition decisions. Once you’ve decided which workflows to move, prepare them by either replacing actions that are more compatible for Office 365 or assessing the benefits of rebuilding the process from scratch in order to take maximum advantage of Office 365’s platform functions. Remember, there’s no wrong way to build a workflow, but there are more efficient ways for that workflow to run depending on the platform and functionality available. Choosing a Nintex Migration PartnerNot every process – including those requiring high security – should be migrated. The more security required for a process, the les

SummaryNintex Form Rule will not execute as expected when using the List Lookup Control output for the value used in Nintex Rule due to ID-prefix. ResolutionWhile in the Nintex Form Designer, do the following:Alter the Rule to remove the ID-Prefix by using the replace() runtime function and adding the following RegEx:"^[0-9]+;#" For Example:If 'test' is the first value in the list, the value would appear as: "1;#test". A formatting rule will be created to hide a different control, if the List Lookup Control, "LLUP" has a value of 'test'. The following Rule will be used: replace(LLUP, "^[0-9]+;#", "" ) == "test"