News and Guidelines

If there was one piece of advice I could give you, it would be to wear sunscreen.  If there were two pieces of advice, it would be to wear sunscreen and come to xchange 2018.  You'll need that sunscreen in San Diego!  Think about all the Nintex-related things you do throughout the year: ask questions, attend user groups and other related conferences, attend webex updates and place support calls.  Lots of stuff right?  Well think of all that crammed into a couple of days.  That's what xchange is all about. I've attended the two previous Nintex conferences and come away from both full of motivation, ideas and a quest to make the world a better place through digital transformation. Let me start by telling you about one thing that isn't officially promoted: fun, fun and more fun!  Each day is jam packed with interesting topics that you will lean so much from but that's only half the equation as far as I'm concerned.  The second half is to make those important connections inside the Nintex

Ali G would be beside himself, if he knew what he could do with Nintex Mobile now. Booyakasha! And it is with great excitement I announce MASI (or Multi Account Sign In) support.. "Wat iz dis ?" you ask, well to put it plainly it means you can login to Nintex Mobile now and create your profile as mentioned here Nintex Mobile introduces Profiles, and adds Forms Based Authentication support​, and associate multiple logins under the 1 profile. Where this will come in super handy is when you have On-premise and O365 deployments and you want to be able to show forms in Nintex Mobile from both environments. Also for the admins, it means you can have your test account logged in and your prod account logged in, so you don't have to log in and out of the different environments when doing testing..  The experience begins with the user entering an email address and selecting “Next”. This begins the profile creation experience.The user then selects the type of account they wish to add to their pro

Description:I have seen lot of developers like to put all the fields of original list inside the task form to give the exact look and feel/functionalities as like of the original form. This type of development have pros and cons from both side. Pros: The task and the original form is having the exact look so that user can't distinguish and also can view/update the original list fields from task form on the course of running the workflow. Also reduce the headache of developers to develop. It's cool.Cons: If we design the task form as like of original form, the size of the workflow get increased and consume more RAM during the run time. And if the instance of the workflow running inside the RAM get increased, its execution time, loading time etc. also get increased. Also mimicking all the task forms as like of original form, increase the development time and violates the re-usability principle. Underlying Risk:Now the situation is very risk. If user find the task form is taking substanti

SummaryHow to configure a Rules to only validate if controls are visible. SymptomNintex Forms Validation will still trigger on hidden form controls, even though the control(s) was not intended to be validated. CauseThe below example shows a form with a Choice control used to show/hide a second panel. The second panel contains a Multi line text box that is required. A formatting rule has been created, which is applied to the panel control:Also, a Validation rule has been created to require data in the Multi text box:If the user is not required to show the second panel and tries to submit the form, they will still see the Validation error: ResolutionThe Validation rule will have to trigger if the required control is visible (in this case the panel) and the Multi line text box is blank:The below form will show that only the required 'Test' field is needed to submit the form and that the Mult line text box validation is ignored:

There have been many occasions where I have mentioned how one could take geolocation (GPS) metadata, usually collected from a Nintex Form, and use that to find a physical address.  So, hot on the heels of a great blog post (Latitude and Longitude UDA from a clever fellow named Vadim Tabakman), I decided to put some of my thoughts down in a more concrete way by conjuring up this post and sharing with you all some pre-built workflow logic that will allow you to perform this kind of reverse geolocation lookup with Nintex Workflow without having to build it yourself! But first, let's go over some use cases for this kind of data. Then, a brief explanation of how to build this and, lastly, links to download the workflow, form and UDA samples. Geolocation Metadata Adds Context to your Data Here are just some of the possible use cases for this type of functionality: Collection (the form)Incidents (safety, remediation, compliance, etc.) Customer service improvement (Know where and when your fie

So this morning I was trying to write to a date & time field on a button click on the new responsive forms designer. I clicked on the button settings > Advanced > Connected To but in my list of columns, my Date & Time column wasn't there. It appears that only the text based columns can be written to here. This was frustrating, especially as you can write the date and time to a text column using the common references. Ah-ha, I wonder? Let's see. That light bulb moment you just witnessed was me thinking, if I set the button to write to a Single Line of Text (SLOT) using the "Current Time" reference, I get myself a date and time, that's fine, but no good for reporting really, I want my datatype to be Date and time, not just a string containing the date and time. Nevertheless, I published the form and knowing that my button was configured how I wanted it to be, then in my list, head to the List Settings, head to the SLOT column settings for the column I've just connected my b

You can download the Nintex Form, Workflow and List template here.   Introduction  Why Document Generation?Consider this scenario where departments wants to create a Human Resources NDA for external vendor, Sales department requires sales quotes, Management requires report etc in various Office formats such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc.  These processes are extremely manual and tedious as follows:Ad-Hoc documents Take too long to create Opportunity for errors And most importantly, no integration with other systems.  Therefore, hampers the productivity of an organization. What is Document Generation (DocGen)?        Nintex Workflow helps to generate documents by connecting relevant department, leverage your business process and content in your digital workplace. You also have opportunity to integrate other systems such as Office 365, Box, Salesforce and you can also utilize Adobe Sign or DocuSign for electronic signatures.  With DocGen you can connect to ANY DATA and not just Office 3

How to get Task Comments and more in Nintex Workflow for 365. Note:  Task ID’s have been added to Assign a task as of October 2017. See  Office365 - Query Task IDs for Multiple Approvers! for details. This is the first in a series of blogs that will describe useful building blocks for many automation applications. The final blog will pull these all together in a simple but illustrative example. Introduction:In SharePoint online the “Start a task process” is the action that allows assigning a task to multiple assignees. Task IDs are not available from the SharePoint online task engine for the “Start a Task Process” action. As a result Nintex “Start a Task Process” does not provide the facility for capturing task IDs. It simply returns the outcome of the task, with no information as to how that outcome was derived (who selected one outcome and with what comments etc.).It is therefore not obvious how one can capture the task information, a need expressed by many Nintex customers.Many user

To Update manage metadata column in SharePoint list we need two thing:1. Label of manage metadata2. Term ID of the manage metadata.Scenario: I want to update "Europe" in manage metadata column in SharePoint List. I have only label with me which is present in Team store.But I cannot update manage metadata column directly using action "Update Item" as I also need the termid for same.Solution:1.We have to first select the termsetID from which the "termid" need to be taken and save in variableexample: "Country" is TermSet and need to get its ID from "Term Store management".2.Using Taxonomy webservices "<siteurl>_vti_bin/TaxonomyClientService.asmx" in Action "CallWebservices" and user Method as "GetTermsByLabel"Once we get the SOAP Editor details , modify the below Web Service as :  3. We get Result in XML then using "Query XML" get the TermID based on the TermStoreID 4. Once we get the TermID and the update list item using "UpdateListItem" with "label | TermID"example: "Europe|TermID

 Nintex Products used for customer: Nintex Form  Nintex Workflow  Power BI reports backed by Nintex Form.   BUSINESS SITUATION: Before using the Nintex Workflow Platform, Customer’s HUMAN RESOURCES uses MANUAL PROCESSES to track EMPLOYEE MANPOWER, DEMOGRAPHY, DIVERSITY and LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT for their regional Human Resources departments. As a result, they were OVERWHELMED WITH EMAILS and the overall human resource department BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY WAS IMPACTED SIGNIFICANTLY.     SOLUTION:  With the use of Office 365 and Nintex Workflow & Nintex Forms, Nintex Partner helped customer to develop and create a more efficient system to automate their Nintex form and Nintex workflow. Customers had business rules and validations such as employee productivity, number of sick leaves, employee training computations, budget etc. for HR department across all the geolocations. NINTEX FORMS and customized TASK FORMS were used for all the CALCULATIONS, VALIDATIONS and FORMULAS.   Nintex Pa

Nintex Products used for customer: Nintex Form  Nintex Workflow  Nintex Mobile / App Studio  Nintex Hawkeye  BUSINESS SITUATION Client embarked on Office 365 and engaged a service provider to design their Nintex form and Nintex workflows. Nintex form & Nintex workflow started behaving in an under-optimal manner DUE TO PERFORMANCE ISSUES. The system had BECOME UNSTABLE and started throwing cryptic errors. The primary reason was due to POOR APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE and DESIGN. SharePoint lists involved in the design contained more than 200 columns and had 8 workflows which were sequential in nature, not streamlined and simplified.  SOLUTION:NINTEX Partner proceed to PROPOSE A NEW DESIGN with streamlined workflow processes.  The new design had a main list with FEWER COLUMNS and majority fields were kept within the Nintex form which REDUCED THE NINTEX FORM LOAD.A single NINTEX WORKFLOW was used the state machine for IMPROVED MAINTENANCE of a workflow in the FUTURE. The workflow is COMP

Seems like only yesterday it was February 2017, and I was in New Orleans at InspireX meeting everyone, and giving my very first conference presentation on governance. Now here we are, November already, and I'm eagerly starting the countdown to XChange 2018.  On the fence as to whether or not you should go? Here are my top 3 reasons why it's a valuable trip: 3)  The Experts Lounge Imagine this: a huge, ballroom-esque room, full of round tables, with 10 seats each. Each table has a card, much like at a wedding, denoting who is to sit there -- however, this is denoting the type of expertise available at each table. Document Generation. Advanced Workflows. Hawkeye. Drawloop. Every topic is covered, and there is a group of people there discussing the ins and outs of each. Ever had a question and wanted a Nintex expert to answer it to your face? This is the spot. 2)  Learn About All Nintex Offerings Wonder if you're missing out on something Nintex has to offer because you aren't always up to

This is something that threw me for a loop for longer than I care to admit. When you are updating a Word doc to use with content controls that are updated from a Nintex workflow, you cannot just save the document with the "Save" icon in the toolbar depicted in the screenshot below: You must use the File - Save As method and be sure to navigate to the library where the document is stored and overwrite the existing Word doc there.  This may seem elementary to some, but I'd like to document it to save others some trouble.

A three months Tentative Production Plan helps procurement division to plan what material to acquire to support the production of compressor at the production site. There are two types of materials to be shipped to a production plant,Movement of material from one plant to the destination production plant/storage Delivery Order directly from its supplier to the plant/storage Nintex Mobile application is being used at the plant supporting Goods Receipt at the point where materials are being received. This minimized the need for personnel at the plant to receive goods by noting it on paper, and the need to go back to the office desktop to update the good receipts using a desktop computer with SAP console installed. Updates of good movement is now instantly done over at the point of good receipts using Nintex Mobile, and data are being updated immediately to the SAP system powered by Nintex Workflow with Workflow Connectors provided by Theobald Software. For the purpose, a "Goods Receipt"

In this blog post I'd like to provide a step-by-step guide to build a dynamic repeating section with Nintex Forms that can be used in order forms for example. Furthermore this guide will include a solution to check the total price of an order against a predefined budget. The focus of the whole solution will be on the Calculated Value control, the Lookup function, Runtime functions and Rules. I've created this guide by using Nintex Forms 2016 (On-Premises), but it should also work for Nintex Forms 2013 (On-Premises). In the repeating section the user will be able to choose from a specified list of products, whereby the price of the product, the overall price based on the desired amount and a picture of the product will be shown. At the end of the form the user will see the overall price of all products and furthermore will get an information whether she or he is still in the defined budget or not. At the end the form will look like this (Display mode): Creation and configuration of the

Greetings everyone   You might remember my previous post where I illustrated how you can dynamically build a list of approvers and assign tasks to them in a loop via a Nintex® Workflow. In this post I've included an example  .  Author Palesa Sikwane‌ Long Description Want to Create a list of approvers dynamically using Nintex Workflow? This is the post for you! Dependencies Nintex® Workflow for Office 365®, SharePoint Online® (Office 365®) Support Info Palesa Sikwane‌ Additional Information N/A  My previous post Assigning Tasks Dynamically Using Start a Task Process in NWF0365 can be summarised as:  1. Querying a List of Approvers 2. Assigning Tasks for Each Brand Dynamically Step 1: Querying the list of approversI have configured a list containing my Approval matrix per brand name (I went with cereal brands as an example   ): Brand Name Approver Name Deputy Name Weetbix Palesa Emmanuel Sikwane Richard Roe Kellogs Richard Roe Palesa

Sometimes, you have a need to pull back a date from Active Directory to use in your workflow. Maybe you're querying for Account Expiration dates, or maybe you want to know when that employee last logged in. And maybe you need to store that in a column for some reason. If that's the case, then you'll be met with a bit of grief.   Active Directory has decided, for whatever reason, that 100-nanoseconds is the super cool way to store a date/time.  And SharePoint does not care for that. It would much prefer that you give it a format it understands, if you wish to view it as a date. But, using the action Query Excel Services in our workflow, we can get a readable date.  It's super simple -- the workflow, not the math -- (and I'm a workflow person not a math person) -- so let's dive right in. The formula in Excel to convert the returned Active Directory time into a Date looks like this: (Where A1 = the cell containing your timestamp) =IF(A1>0,A1/(8.64*10^11) - 109205,"")Source: TechNet  1)

In my environment we are using host named site collections for a service that we offer to our clients. Each client has their own site collection and for security and data isolation we use dedicated content databases for both the SP and the Nintex databases. Occasionally a workflow or two will start acting wonky (usually after we upgrade our 3rd party software that we use Nintex to interact with). With over 160 clients you can imagine that it can be more than a couple having trouble and while we do get notified when workflows fail, sometimes a failing workflow is elusive. That's where PowerShell comes in. It may be possible to do this via CSOM but I've not experimented with that much. Using CSOM would let you write a script on your desktop and run it against your farm. It really depends on your permissions. The trick to finding these workflows is looking at the workflows that are running on an item. Workflows in our environment run against SPItems though we also have a few that run on S

Dear all:It's a simple workaround to assign a temporary "unique" value to an element before create it in the list. When you are creating an new element using Nintex Forms, you don't have the "ID" value until you "save" the element the first time. Imagine you want to link some child list elements before save the parent element the first time. You need the parent element "primary key" to link with the child, commonly the "ID"(Check Forms: Parent / Child structure using List view Control to know how to link a parent element with a child elements in a separate list) I don't know how to generate a "unique value" into Nintex Forms in a easy way , so the workaround could be to generate a temporary "ID" as a "fake unique value"   to assign to the new child items. Then, when you save the parent element and run the workflow, it could re-assign the "ID" just created to the child elements,  getting the child list items in a collection variable, looking for the elements with the "fake unique value"

Scenario: I want to query items that were modified in the last 7 calendar days. How can I query the list to return record IDs: 208, 209, 210Here with alternatives/tricky solution in creating your workflow.First solution:1. Go to workflow designer, drag Calculate date action:2. Configure the Calculate date as below: 3. Pass the Data and time variable in Query List action: Second solution:1. Before creating your workflow, go to your list setting and create a new column (Calculated type) named “Last 7 Days” and formula as "=[Modified]+7" Note: If you want Date range of 2 days, then you can + 2.  2. After that, the column will be auto shown in your list with formatted value.Note: The Modified column is auto updated if any changes to the item, the new column that been created will be auto updated as well. Both are not editable. 3. Go to Nintex workflow designer, drag the action Query List and create a “Today date” variable by click on Variables option from Query List action’s ribbon.4. Cli

Recently I started playing around with the nintex O365 workflow rest api (http://help.nintex.com/en-us/sdks/sdko365/). Although not everything is possible (as saving new workflows), because web request action does not support passing of binary strings and cuts off null bits (0x00), so the passed file is found by the API as incorrect BUT first thing I faced during my exercise was: HOW TO OBTAIN FedAuth security cookie? I read articles, reviewed stackoverflow forums and similar looking for an answer how to achieve it using JavaScript. I was a bit upset with the results but then I found this precious article: Remote authentication in SharePoint Online | … And All That JS and everything went clear on how to obtain the cookie inside Nintex Workflow  The following post is showing how to obtain 3 important security variables, that SharePoint requires from requester to "trust":fedauth cookie rtfa cookie requestdigest token Security Cookies First, the cookies. To get them I must simulate authen

You can access to the workflow Service Health on this page >>> "/_layouts/15/WorkflowServiceHealth.aspx" , and you will see the current status including the workflow queue length. Then you will see a table with the columns:Workflow name Started Suspended Canceled Terminated Completed Total , showing the number of those status   Also you can click on the information button  and will see Details of this specific workflow, showing the Most recent update and also a link to Terminate all instances of the workflow.

Nintex Forms allows a Forms Designer to set conditional formatting and validation within their task form using the outcome values (Approve, Reject and the other custom outcomes) the form designer may have made in the Flexi-task action. For information on how to configure the Formatting Rule, please read the following post: Using validation rules to ensure a comments box is not left empty However, one question that comes up is, why is the Formatting/Validation rule written around an outcome equaling a number and not the value 'Approve' or 'Reject'? For example, in a Nintex Task Form, you may see a Validation or Formatting Rule that looks like this: Well, what is the '1' that we are talking about?  Why not the term 'Approve'? In the Nintex Workflow Config database, you will find a table called 'dbo.ConfiguredOutcomes'. That table stores the Id as well as the associated Name for the outcomes used in the 'Decision' control of the Nintex Task Form. When writing a Formatting/Validation rule

Electronic Signature can greatly speed up those processes which rely on a signature and where waiting for a wet signature can add days, often weeks to that process such as contract and invoice generation.  Leveraging the data captured from an initial Nintex form passed into Nintex Workflow, no longer do we need to duplicate recipient and initiation information, and thanks to the Nintex Document Generation action, we don't even need to update a standard document each time. We can keep that template secure in a centralised SharePoint location without the risk of end users editing the source of truth.Adobe provides the entire signing platform and handles the whole process securely online. Coming to Nintex Workflow for Office 365 on the June release is the Adobe Sign action:The Adobe Sign action is the perfect partner to the Nintex Document Generation action in Workflow for Office 365, for more information on that, see Dan Stoll introduction post at https://community.nintex.com/community/t

Over the last few weeks Nintex has been talking about and showing a new Enterprise service called Nintex Hawkeye. Nintex Hawkeye gives you an unprecedented view into your process portfolio enabling you to monitor your business, get answers quickly and make informed decisions. Businesses can use Nintex Hawkeye to identify which processes yield the best business results and target those that are ripe for improvement. Nintex Hawkeye brings a new generation of analytics for human-centric processes, the people who use them, and the content they create. A key aspect to this capability is the Nintex Hawkeye Process Intelligence lens. The Process could be 1 or more workflows across multiple system, that contribute to a single "Process". With the Process Intelligence Lens, we want to dive into the information, not just about the workflow/s but also the context information that is involved as well. The first thing you need to do to get the ball rolling is to decorate the workflow. Now by decorat