News and Guidelines

Good day, THE STORYWe have a consulting firm that is busy with a staffing optimisation project and the consultant phoned me to ask if I can add a Spreadsheet somewhere on the intranet so that the HR guys can book people for the training.  So I asked the consultant a few questions about the booking, i.e. Where will it be held? How many computers per training room? How many training rooms? How many sessions does one person attend? What is the main purpose?  After discussing this for a bit with him I told him that we can probably do something better with some SharePoint lists and a bit of workflow THE DETAILThe training will happen at one of our training centres at 2 of the training rooms. They are Training room 3 and 4 and there are 16 computers per training room.  There are also 2 sessions for each day with the possibility of adding a third ses

In a bit of an "I have a pen, I have an apple... applepen" moment, I thought what if I combine two awesome blogs - Warwick Ward‌ Mission Accomplished blog Mission Control - External Start with just jQuery, REST and HTML  and Dan Stoll‌ Nintex App Studio for the win  on Custom Content for Nintex App Studio apps. I'm still thinking of applications for this but the buttons could correspond to various static assets or locations such as rooms or machinery that are subject to some sort of point in time vetting / issue raise. I just wanted to see if it would work tbh! Warwick has explained the External Start concept in Nintex Workflow Cloud perfectly so I won

Question from current customer: Using: SP 2013 "I just updated to your May 2017 release of Workflow, and I'm trying to turn on Nintex Live for the first time. I got this error when attempting to Enable Nintex Live for Nintex Workflow in the Live and external setttings:  Sorry, something went wrong: An object of the type Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebConfigJobDefinition named "job-webconfig-modification" already exists under the parent Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService named "". Rename your object or delete the existing object." What you need to know: The error means there is a web config modification job.  These will be created when the solutions are being deployed. These errors can happen if there is c

There are many ways to debug workflows while in development and also when live in production. This is an overview of the methods that can be used and tips on when and when not to use them. Log in History ListThe most used method to get quick information about the status of the workflow, or the output of a variable. Be careful not to overuse this action by placing it in loops or leaving debugging information in place while in production. History is stored in the SharePoint Workflow History list and is truncated by SharePoint after a configurable amount of time. History is also stored in the Nintex Workflow database to allow users to review history much longer after SharePoint removes its list data. This has a great feature, but make sure you are aware and possibly trim history information from databases after some time or databases will fill up too. See Chad Austin’s post on Demystify

Converting a Word Document to PDFI am often asked about seperation of permissions with working and published documents, and a way of doing this nicely with workflow is to use the Convert document action.  We have many instances within the business where a small team have access to a "working" document library but push finalised and approved documents to an open document library for all authenticated users to consume.  We will use this scenario for the working example below.  We will have our "working" document library called Read Write PDF and have our "published" document library called Shared Documents.  All users will have access to read the content of Shared Documents but only team members will have access to Read Write PDF.Navigate to the Read Write PDF document library and select Library tab in the ribbon, Workflow Settings and Create a Workflow in Nintex Workflow. Se

Now how can I just say that without giving you a perfectly good reason as to why ??  To explain how and why Nintex Mobile just got a little smarter, let me take a few steps backwards and explain how it worked in the past in very basic terms.  When Nintex Mobile establishes a valid Internet connection, it would immediately submit any queued forms/tasks. This method was problematic however, as VPNs act in a similar way, where a valid internet connection needs to be established first and then the VPN could establish itself..  This became quite evident with customers who were regularly working with the offline capabilities of Nintex Mobile. Whether the forms were being submitted deep in a mine shaft, or in a "no cell / wifi" res

The Mobile forms that Nintex provides are powerful and make it so easy for users to gather data out and about.  But every so often, we run into a function that we're so used to using on Desktop, but isn't available in Mobile. A great example of that is the lookup() function. We have List Lookup at our fingertips, but sometimes we need to calculate a value without our users needing to select from a dropdown with only one value in it.  Just because this is how I've gotten around it, doesn't mean it's the right way! So let's think about what a use case scenario might be.  

I have set up create item workflow on list database which is set to start on item creation and creates word document out list item properties. The documents are being created in document library on the same site as list database is. This workflow is set up the following way. It has just create item action  and it works fine. When item is created in the list document is also created in the library. BUT, I have a second workflow on that list which is set up to start when item is modified and it is supposed to Update document based on changes done in parent item. It is set up the following way the first two actions are to build Update doc source and output URL (consists of [path to doc library]/[current

This post is a review of the April 2017 releases of all Nintex products. What is included in this post is my personal observation/opinion. I decided to write a review not in the same month anymore so I can name all new features, the release notes are up-to-date and I perhaps even have some time to play with them  This month, there were besides the new functionalities mentioned in this blog post, also several minor improvements, bugfixes and some security improvements. Although I do not describe the improvements, some are pretty nice too. Good work Nintex! The biggest feature changes were imo in ‘Nintex Workflow Cloud’ and ‘Nintex Workflow for Office 365’.  *** Nintex Workflow Cloud ***ChangesSome new connector events and connector actions. New action: Log to instance details. Availability of Nintex Hawkeye workflow analytics.

I come to the Nintex Community on a regular basis because I want to stay on top of new features.  For me, this translates into experience in what I am doing in my current job because I am learning through other's examples and feedback. I also try to leave my insight for the next user with the hopes that they will learn something through my experiences.  This happened just the other day with the May Mission - Quick Top Tip!  I was looking over all of the great tips and tricks that other users have and while most of these are "common sense", many of them I never really took the time to practice. One in particular is to slow down and think of a plan before diving into development. Again, this makes complete sense, but how many times do we get super excited with a new project and think of all the cool things Nintex can provide for us, and then just jump right into the canvas and start dragging in actions!

When attempting to provide everyone in my tenant permissions to very public content, I ran into trouble understanding the various options I have. Traditionally when on premise, We would grant the All Authenticated Users access to home pages to make sure all users can have access. In O365 and SharePoint Online there are new groups available but each has a slight differentiating attribute. Here they are and what defines them.  Account Description Identifier Everyone All authenticated and guest users c:0(.s|true

 Nintex has provided detailed installation guides for all their products, so I hear you asking: what value is he adding here?  Over my numerous installations of Nintex products, I find that even when I follow the Installation Guide's steps, I still run into issues, either during the installation process, or later when my clients start using Nintex heavily. In this post I will focus on installing Nintex Workflow and Forms 2013. I will combine the steps from the official Nintex Guide, with the solutions for the issues I have seen in a number of different environments.  At the end of this article, I added references to a number of resources that you can check out, if you are interested in more details. Have questions or suggestions to improve this guide? I would love to hear from you in the Comments section.  Let's get started... 1) Nintex Workflow and Forms 2013 Installation Prerequisites 1. Nintex Workflow 2013 l

I’ve seen it quite often recently – questions about getting data from User Profiles using office 365 query user profile action. In the end it is quite easy, but you must be familiar with some prerequisites  SharePoint Online User Profile propertiesBasically, there are two approaches:If you have an on-premise #activedirectory or an AD set in azure, then you can synchronize properties from that locations into azure active directory (AAD) using Azure AD Sync (AAD Sync – it replaces DirSync). If you are working in the Office 365 tenant exclusively, the properties can be managed and their value set using https://[tenant_name]-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/tenantprofileadmin/MgrProperty.aspx?ProfileType=Us

I was wondering if I could turn the document generation functionality into document conversion (Word > PDF), and guess what, it can be done! The most important ingredient is what I call 'dynamic templates'. This is possible because the templates used by the Nintex document generation action, only need to be available at build and run time (of the document generation action). Nothing is stopping you to change the template in the mean time  The solution presented in this blog post consists of three parts: 1. Initialization.2. Making sure that the previous document in the library is converted before proceeding.3. Converting the document. I created two libraries

G'day, this is Dan on behalf of Rick   and Rick wanted me to tell all you fine Nintex for O365 workflow designers that we are thinking about you.. Quite often in the design process, you build in some debugging actions like log to history, Send email, set variable etc etc to capture information to help you along with your designs.. Also when you are building and designing your workflows you would have to find the actions that are causing you grief, whether it is a config error in your design, or you are just testing out an action for later. You want to be able to just disable this action or set of actions rather than delete everything only to find that that bit you just deleted wasn't the issue at all. Because once you delete them, you have to configure them from the beginning...Now this is far from optimal..  Now as the title suggests, the functionality that On-prem workflow designers have

Whenever you hear the great Dick Vitale say “it's awesome baby!" you know it's that time of year. We get to spring forward (for those states that recognize DLST), begin to break out the shorts, plan spring breaks, and like a springtime version of the holiday season, we get to fulfill the annual dream of trying to fill out the perfect March Madness bracket (never mind the 1 in 9.2 quintillion chance of that actually happening). Last year the Summit 7 Systems team had a lot of fun building a Bracketology Solution powered by Nintex Forms and Workf

   We’ve all heard the phrase “Lightning Ready”, but what does that mean? More importantly, what does that mean for Nintex’s Drawloop? To help shed some “Light-ning” on this (pun intended!), our resident expert and Partner Technical Evangelist, Ryan O’Leary has outlined the most common questions with supporting answers! What does “Lightning Ready” mean for Nintex Drawloop Document Generation? Can we generate documents by clicking our existing button? Is batch document generation supported in Lightning? Will all the documents being generated in Salesforce Workflow still work? Being that Salesforce has promoted Lightning Components, does that mean Drawloop has a Lightning Component? Do we have to reconfigure all of our Document Packages to support Lightning? What does “Lightning Ready” mean for Nintex Drawloop Document Generation?    Great news! Nintex’s Drawloop product has been ready since A

This post was originally posted on my blog, sopkow.com.If you've got a Flexi Task and you want to replace the Decision Control with buttons that submit the form and sets an outcome, you can do so with just a little bit of configuration and a touch of JQuery. The following describes how this can be easily accomplished On our Nintex Form, add a Decision Control, we will be using JQuery to hide this field (if you don’t want to use JQuery you can place it behind another control). Note that we can’t set this to Visible: No , because we will need the control rendered into the form.Next, add ‘Save and Submit’ buttons to your form (one for each outcome). In the advanced section of the control’s properties, set the onclick of the first button to:NWF$('#'+myDecisionControl+'_0').prop("checked", true);retu

I was presented with a problem the other day, and in a short amount of time I had to build a demo that had to take "Orders" from Nintex Mobile and place the orders into a SharePoint list. From there, the order had to be placed into Salesforce..  I got a little carried away, and figured I could get away with adding in a few more elements, so Ryan O'Leary‌ helped me out with some Salesforce and Nintex Drawloop‌ love, so not only could I get the order into Salesforce, but I could use Nintex Drawloop to build out the order into a PDF send it off to Docusign for the customers signature.. Lost you ?? no.. good ok.. So I decided to go down this path of over engineering  and why not, I had had the perfect use case..  So to spell it out.. this is what I wanted to do.

This seems to be a common ask, and this is by no means the only way to do this! This is a simple approach using out-of-the-box functionality and can be setup in a few minutes in a site workflow or a list workflow. The "ask":Return all users from a SharePoint User Group in First Name Last Name format. Setup and Overview:First step is to get the User Group name that we need to interrogate. Once we have that, we can make a web service call and get a collection of all logins, loop through them and build a list of all users. Done. Here are the variables that I will be using:**Note that I am doing this as a SITE WORKFLOW and have my varGroupName required and on my start form.If you want to make this in a list workflow, you will need to alter that piece and feed it in a different way. The workflow:

Welcome to Part 3 of this Dictionary series.  The previous two posts can be found here:Dictionary Part 1 - Manually Creating a DictionaryDictionary Part 2 - Query XML results into a Dictionary  There are a number of web services that come with SharePoint online.  Both ASMX and REST services.  In this post, we're going to look at making a query to a SharePoint REST services, store the results into a Dictionary variable and parse those results. The service we will call, is the lists service.  The url will look like this : http://[siteurl]/_api_web/lists This will give us a bunch of data about every list in that site.  In this example, we want two pieces of information.  The List name and the List template it was

This topic describes the concept of assigned use in the context of workflow-based subscription licensing. If your tenant uses a workflow-based subscription license, then you must specify assigned use when publishing workflows and forms in accordance with subscription licensing terms. Examples of assigned use options presented when publishing workflows and forms:   Assigned use options are as follows. Development: Intended for the development phase; the workflow or form does not operate on or affect any business outcome or data outside testing and development. Watermarks appear on development workflows and forms as well as on email messages sent by workflows. (Form preview omits the watermark.) Example: Running an expenditure approval workflow generates a request for purchase of a notebook computer and that request is appr

With Nintex App Studio you can create your own branded Nintex app. What perhaps not everyone knows, is that you can filter the forms and tasks that are shown in it. This functionality is already present for some time but the way to do this has changed over time. This blog post has the goal to show you how to filter forms and tasks in your custom branded Nintex App at this moment. I created the following objects for the purpose of this blog post:A workflow in Nintex Workflow Cloud. This workflow contained an 'Express approval' action. Two lists in Office 365. The lists have their own Nintex form and both have a Nintex workflow connected to it containing a flexi task. Four lists in SharePoint 2016. The lists have their own Nintex form and 2 lists have a Nintex workflow connected to it containing a flexi task. Two lists in SharePoint 2013. The lists have their own Nintex form and both have a Nintex workflow connected to

Question from a current customer: I am looking to create wizard-style workflow. It supposed to have a form with tabs: "Request Permission", "Select Files", "Confirm Selection", "Upload", Edit Metadata".Each tab is responsible for certain step in the workflow (an action would be performed and workflow state changed). Workflow state may be changed conditionally. I am having trouble creating such a workflow in Sharepoint. It only provides single initiation form by default. The form would clos

Nintex Hawkeye™ is a workflow analytics solution that gives you an unprecedented view into your process portfolio across the entire Nintex Workflow Platform. Today I'm pleased to share that it now supports Nintex for Office 365 and Nintex Workflow Cloud. For those of you who have the Nintex for Office 365 Enterprise subscription (Workflow based) and skipped over previous posts about the topic, revisit Getting Started with a Nintex Hawkeye Process Intelligence Lens... Because thi