News and Guidelines

We all know we are here because we work on something that is related to Nintex Workflow or Forms, and the reason we use Nintex Workflow or Forms is because it makes our life easier. Things have changed a lot these days, trending towards the cloud, hybrid environment becoming very common that most of us are working on both on premise platform and at the same time on the cloud. Regardless of which platform you use, you will find Nintex helps. Part 1 of GKK Compressor Industry blog series, I am going to share exactly how I use my hybrid environment to save the efforts for my recent investment - GKK Compressor Industry. GKK Compressor Industry is "Lean Manufacturing" produces world class compressors. Moving towards a Six Sigma company, Simplifying Processes and

Hi Friends, It has been an amazing August. I got to spend some time with the folks over in the Bellevue office and was fortunate to have enjoyed a bit of sunshine while I was there. Lots of things coming down the release pipe in the coming months. However I want to focus on the now; the 2 releases we did for August culminated in an epic feature roll out. I believe this is one of our biggest release months we have done in the history of Nintex Workflow Cloud. Collapse and expand actions - manage navigating large workflow designs by collapsing and expanding branching and containerized workflow actions. In addition, the collapse and expand state of an action is retained on save and publish. Something to think about - you might want to keep sections collapsed / or placed in "Action sets" to help make the workflow more readable / understandable when a user opens it, rather than being show the entire workflow design at first open.

In the support organization, there are frequently customer requests for how to properly refresh Test / Dev Environments with Production data.  The steps below can be used as an example for how to migrate content.  These steps are some basic guidelines around the process for migrating data from a Production Farm to a Test farm, but as all SharePoint farms are different, you may need to adjust these accordingly to meet your specific business needs.  Production Farm StepsBackup Your DatabasesIf you wish to preserve the current workflow history and state, it is recommended that you stop the target Web Application Pool(s) in IIS along with the SharePoint Timer Service in Services.MSC prior to performing backup operationsSharePoint SharePoint Content Databases Nintex Form

Related links Did You Know: The Magnificent Flexi Task – BehaviorDid You Know: The Magnificent Flexi Task – Reminders and Escalation Did You Know: The Magnificent Flexi Task – Communication Methods  The Flexi task is one of the most popular workflow actions and we are eagerly awaiting its arrival in the o365 version.  For something so powerful, how much of it do you really know?  How many of the options have you used? Today I want to concentrate on the behaviour section:

In the recent request for community members to name their favourite workflow action, I put forward the "Copy To SharePoint" action, this was down simply to the element of surprise, that it helped me do exactly what I wanted to, easily, with no hacking, or fudging, as we call it. I had a requirement for attachments in an event calendar to be treated like true SharePoint managed documents when uploaded by users. Step 1We've created an OOTB calendar. We've also created a document library called "Event Resources" and in that library we've added some Site columns, the ones that will contain metadata in the event calendar that we want to associate with the document. The meatdata is important because we will use it later to give the users a nice way of viewing the documents. Step 2We will create a workflow that will run on Create or Modfied and the first action we will insert is "Copy to SharePoint",

Workflow-veterans know: when you publish a new list-workflow to SharePoint a new column is added to the list, which show the current status of the workflow. Typically, these statuses are: in progress, completed, error and canceled.There is a corresponding workflow-action, which allows to write in any custom status, for example if an item has been approved or needs additional review. This allows a more fine grained insight of the current status of a workflow.Starting with SharePoint 2013 Microsoft introduced the Windows Azure Workflow infrastructure in addition to the existing workflow engine from the .Net Framework. This new engine is totally independed of SharePoint (and is therefore a separate setup as well).If you publish a new WAW-workflow this will also create a new status-column, but this column will actually be left blank (at first), when a new instance is started.

Configurations lists within a workflow process can make any workflow more dynamic in nature. It allows workflows to always have the latest information to make correct decisions. They can also effect workflow that are in-flight, or already started. We have been using this practice for many years and have continued to use them in O365. I came across a scenario while using configuration lists to gather the current person who should approve a task. Over time, this approver can change for various reasons. In order to prevent continual updates being made to a workflow to simply change who to assign a task to, a config list was put in place. In this article, I will show how to create a config list for a workflow, and how to gather a person value using two methods.  Configuration ListMost config lists are simple custom lists. From Site Contents you can select new to create a list if in Modern UI, use the gear menu and click "Add an app" then choose custom list, or in

I'm posting this as an alternative to another article posted here on removing orphaned and duplicate ECB menu Items. That one doesn't work for me since I have around 160 sites to manage with more on the way. We have a real problem with these buggers since we have to update our workflows more frequently than perhaps the normal workflow and we end up with alot of orphans in our menus. It's important to know at the start that we do not change the names of our workflows each time we publish a new version of the workflow. I doubt many places do but thought I'd mention that. If you are doing that this script won't work for you as written. The script can be modified to run against every site in a farm or on a single list which is what I was after and explains why I'm not using LINQ or something more efficient. In this case ease of maintenance trumps effi

I have been working with Nintex workflows for a long time now and have only just started using this action.  It is so simple but so powerful and has saved me doing this painful step in a lot of my workflows: ScenarioI have a workflow that runs for all types of users entered into a list.  Most of the workflow is relevant to all types of users but there are some things that I would like to be done only if the user type is Employee.  Yes, I could use a Run If action, but I am using this fairly simple scenario to explain the filter action. The Filter ActionAs opposed to a Set a condition action where only one branch is executed, or a Run if action where the contents are run only on a condition being met, this action literally only executes the actions below it if the condition is met, otherwise the workflow is ended.  No need to add actions to a Run i

Many of you, like me, will have seen and used this feature many times.  What does it do?  Well it allows you to add a shortcut to your start workflow page directly on the item context menu.These are the settings you need on workflow settings: This then, when the workflow is published, displays as such on the item context menu: Now I have been using this awesome feature for many years and then Paul Crawford‌ asked me why he seemed to be limited to only adding four workflows to the menu?!  I have never needed to add this many before so wasn't aware of any limitation... I won't pretend I solved it, because I didn't, but he came up with a quick fix that I wanted to blog about so that neither of us forgot this simple trick: Rather t

Office 365 with SharePoint Online has excellent custom form and workflow options, that is a known fact.Those who love InfoPath Designer 2013 and SharePoint Designer 2013 can do A LOT of customized workflows, with multiple approval paths, parallel approvals, conditional task and anything else you can think of or not, with the OOTB actions and steps in SharePoint Designer 2013. I love InfoPath Designer and I love SharePoint designer, there is no secondary thought about that. But what you love need not always be what is loved by all. So in comes Nintex. My first time with Nintex Form and Nintex Workflow.Straight forward request this time.There is a Sofware Request form, when a user submits request -> Approver A->Approves->Approver B->Approves->Approver A again for further actions.Creating the custom sharepoint list with the identified fields is nothing new. Once the list

With the new Nintex Document Generation action in Nintex for Office 365, it is now possible to create an Excel Report from Sharepoint List items. With the output options of either its original format (i.e. Excel file in this case) or PDF in the defined destination of Sharepoint folder, you can then automate the generated report document for approval as usual in Nintex Workflow. In the following diagram, I have my Expense home page consists of Expense Items (i.e. Customer List) and Create Expense Report query form. Create Expense Report Query form is a simple form one can use to specify report filter criterial (i.e. Title, Start Date and End Date, etc. of the items to be included in the excel report to be generated). The Create Expense Report query form is nothing but just another cust

In my last post I already talked about how I migrated my Nintex for Office365 tenant to Europe and how I faced the challenge to find all the sites where the Nintex Workflow for Office365 app has been activated in order to re-publish my workflows. PowerShell to the rescue!It was obvious, that only PowerShell could help in this challenge. So let's walk through this step-by-step. At first we need to find all the sites where the Nintex Workflow App has been activated.$userName = "[username]@[mydomain.fqdn]"$siteColUrl = "https://[tenant].sharepoint.com/sites/[mysite]"Add-Type -Path "d

When designing a Nintex form, it's common that there is a part of the form that should only display to certain users. These sections are usually contained in their own panels within the form. It could be IT administrative details, financial information, or actions for HR to complete. In Nintex On Premises, it is easy to hide this panel based on the current user by using a rule and the inline function fn-IsMemberOfGroup. Unfortunately, that function is not available yet in Nintex Forms for Office 365.This function is available in O365 Forms, it just does not appear in the Runtime Function list. If you manually type it in, it will work.

Hi Friends! July has been a busy month here at Nintex Workflow Cloud (and the whole of Nintex). I want to take the opportunity to highlight some of the key features and capabilities released and why you might want to use them. Express approval support for task escalation - you now have the ability to escalate the task you have assigned or choose to complete the tasks by setting it to the default outcome after the original task has not been responded to timely manner (you can set the time of escalation of course). Disabling (and enabling) actions in the designer - as a designer you'll be able to disable both unconfigured and configured workflow actions. Very handy when you're progressively designing your workflow or troubleshooting / testing your workflow. If you're asking "Can I publish a workflow with disabled unconfigured action(s)?", Yes! You absolutely can. So if you're stubbing out your workflow and wan

I came upon a stumbling block a few days ago during an effort to re-engineer some old InfoPath forms into Nintex for O365 forms. The culprit was the Choice Field Control. It does NOT work the same in both applications. Initial Control DisplayI got this when I dragged and dropped the choice control onto the Nintex Form for O365 canvas - and was initially stumped. Where are my choices?? Looking at the control's properties, I knew it had more than one choice. So, I figured that it must be a sizing thing - and I was correct. I was able to see all of the choices by re-sizing the boundaries of the control. Vertical vs. Horizontal Layou

Updated: Aug. 2, 2017  Please note that Scheduled workflows feature has been released as of July 2017. Please see  for more details on this fix.As many of you are aware our product teams are working hard in extending the capabilities of Nintex Workflow for Office 365. Some features might currently be missing but will certainly make it to the product soon. In the meanwhile, most of the features you might miss can still be implemented, simply by thinking a bit outside the box.One of these features is scheduled workflows. In this post I will show you how you can use existing workflow actions, SharePoint features and quite simple logic to allow workflows to run on a schedule power users can easily maintain themselves. What do we need?I provided the templates for the following as part of this post. Feel free to download and use t

I'm very excited to see the new Scheduling features for O365 Workflows. As first read from Tee Up Your Work - Scheduled Workflows Are Available for Office 365!‌ we learned the basics of scheduling site workflows. So I ran a few site workflows myself and could not find the history that they executed. My first test workflow would send me an email, since I received the email I knew it was working. But there was no evidence. Typically, I would go to Site Contents from the suite menu gear, then click on Site Workflows.I then see my normal screen of available site workflows to run, and which are still running or completed. Notice in this view I don't see anything in the completed section, yet I had the Email Site Workflow scheduled to run and it executed.

Question:I absolutely love the option of creating ‘pages’ in a form, which is an option in InfoPath. I start with the first page to ask the user a question. Depending on the selection they make, it will flip to a new page to ask additional questions or asks the user to fill in information. Once complete, they click submit and it flips to the final page saying thank you and provides any additional information.I also like the ability to create new pages based on what the user is doing, i.e. new item or edit item. If it is a new item, I start with Page 1. If I am editing an item, it starts with Page 8, which has all the information in read only format. Simple and easy to work with.However, the concept of ‘pages’ in Forms does not exist. It looks like I have to add ‘sections’, and then determine which one should be active based on a ‘value’. That does not

Author Palesa Sikwane‌ Long Description An update on Nintex® Workflow Microsoft® Dynamics Live Actions and Native CRM Actions Affected Product(s) Nintex® Workflow 2013 Nintex® Workflow 2016 Nintex® Workflow for Office 365  Release Notes Nintex Workflow 2013 - Release Notes  Nintex Workflow 2016 - Release Notes  Nintex Workflow for Office 365 - Release Notes

Question:  I’m trying to make task due dates dependent on the day the task notice is sent, so that if a completed task approval leads next to an additional task being created for someone else, and that 2nd person has 3 days to complete it, I’m expecting to find a way to make the Due Date = (Task Creation Date) + 3. Is there a way to program that?  Answer: In the Approval Branch for the initial task, add an “Add Time to Date” action and set it to 3 days with the date set at ‘Use date when action is executed.’ From there you can configure the task due date in the next Task to use the workflow variable you created in the previous action. 

This is just information published on the SharePoint 2016 help page  The following form controls are supported for use in Nintex Mobile form layouts. Attachments controlBorder controlCalculated Value controlChoice control

This list is based on information published on http://help.nintex.com/en-US/nintex2016  External Data Column controlThe External Data Column control enables users to add data from external content types to standard SharePoint lists. Just like an external list, the external data column can display data from any configured external content type. Change Content Type controlThe Change Content Type control enables users to change the content type for a list item in a SharePoint list where there are multiple content types on that list. The control populates itself based on the context of the list. At runtime it relies on the form being run in edit full desktop mode and hence will not work when running in mobile mode. Web Request controlEnterprise Edition for Nintex Forms 2016 is required for this feature.The Web Request

The June Mission is your opportunity to show us how you'd build a workflow for the following: Scenario:A service team has a SharePoint list where users submit requests that they need to fulfill.  There are currently 5 different types of requests that they can receive and each request type has between 20-30 steps that have to be completed in order to fulfill the request.  The team has been having some difficulty keeping track of the status of each request and knowing whether all of the steps have been completed or not.  This has led to some request falling through the cracks and the users are none to happy about it.  The current request types are:Inventory Campaign

Hi all, Ever wondered how many document generations are already consumed and what your limit is? There are 2 options:This information is written in the Workflow History when using the document generation action. Create a workflow, put the document generation action on the canvas, open it and voilà (see screenshot below).  Cheers,Rick ‌