News and Guidelines

Have you ever gained sudden ownership of an abundance of Nintex workflows and forms? I have - over 350 of them - huge, undocumented monoliths, tiny stand-alone notifications - it's a bouquet of Nintex goodness and for the most part I have wrangled the workflows into a state of subservience. Generally, I only interact with these when I need to: maybe there's an error, maybe there's a change request - that's when I swoop into action. But this story isn't about when things go well. This is a story of how on February 21st at 3:28PM, the click of a vague button on an inconspicuous page by a well-meaning end user cost me over 5 hours of work.  

Hi, I am working on a project where we need to identify and inspect underground workplaces in a mine. To do this we need to work through at least five levels of lookups trying to find a specific record out of more than 200 000. Here is an example of the lookup part of the form: I created a list for the lookup data with only three single-line text columns: ViewName, ParentID and ChildID. I then created indices on the ViewName and ParentID columns. The last piece of the puzzle was the views. I created a view for every list control: Every view displayed the three columns, but were filtered on the value of the ViewName column. Back to the form. I used a choice control displayed as a drop down control as I only had two values to choose from. Here is the control settings for the Leve

In my scenario, I have two lists. The first list is called „Car marks and Product locations“, where I store car marks and the locations where they are produced.The second list is called „Car marks“, there I can create entries and choose between different car marks via a lookup column on my first list. The corresponding locations for the chosen car marks should automatically be stored in an additional column called „Product locations“.The workflow that identifies the corr

Sometimes I needed to cancel all workflow on a specific list. The following powershell script will help you to do this. #Site URL $web = Get-SPWeb "http://urlforsite.com"; $web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = $true; #List Name $list

Good day, We have not implemented this yet but I thought I would share it with you so long. SharePoint with Nintex Workflow, Forms and Live allows you the opportunity to create an in-house e-recruitment solution without having to spend money on some of the other companies out there. First Step:Decide on the fields that you would like to capture information about. This list of fields would be the basis for your form.I created all the fields as part of a Custom list on my SharePoint site. Second Step: Build the FormThen I started editing the Nintex Form for this list.  Move the fields according to your preference. and add repeater sec

Good day, We had a request from our Human Resources Development (HRD) department to have the ability to request confirmation from external training providers for booked training sessions. The emails were going everywhere and it was almost impossible to keep track of the training sessions and their confirmations. We suggested a two list solution to address the requirement:First list is where any of the training administrators can add a training intervention with the details of the external training provider.  The workflow starts as soon as the new item is saved.  It then generates a unique code (Item ID  + Company abbreviation) and sends and email to our HRD Training Manager.  After she approved the external course request and email is sent to the External training provider.  In this email there is the unique code generated as well as a link to a Nintex live form (discussed in next step). Second list is the list with a Nintex Live form

I recently decided to take it upon myself to really push Nintex in our company and spread the good word of what it is capable of. I realized that this would require training on Nintex, but also on SharePoint and process in general. Below is what my initial approach has been thus far! SharePoint, and Workflows, and Forms, Oh My!For some, SharePoint is exciting, but for others it is dreadful! Many users have a predisposition to it and use it for specific purposes. My first step is to discuss SharePoint at a high level and give them a broad view of its capabilities. This allows me to segway into workflows, forms, and process; all of which ties in Nintex. This also lets me understand the level of exposure to these areas and what I need to focus a bit more of or glaze over if needed. Understanding SharePoint and ProcessesI like to ask questions and get participation from my audience so it keeps them engaged and thinking. I generally ask the f

#sharingiscaringWe had the opportunity (and pleasure!) to have one of our customers speak at InspireX. As a follow up to the event, they were gracious enough to do a write up on how Salesforce and Drawloop combined together were able to empower their sales team, reduce their sales cycle, and make their lives just a lot easier! Hope you are able to find a few take-away's from this blog.Click on the here to link to the blog by Steve Thompson at Meritage Homes. Happy Reading!T

While the last post showed how to get an overview of all the sites, where the Nintex Workflow for Office365 App has been activated. The next question is: what workflows exist in the give site, and which of these workflows have been created using Nintex? And again PowerShell is going to help out! Add-Type -Path "d:Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.WorkflowServices.dll"$clientId = "client_id=" + [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($appPrincipalId)$wfmgr = New-Object Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.WorkflowServices.WorkflowServicesManager($ctx, $web)$wfdpl = $wfmgr.GetWorkflowDeploymentService()$wfdefs = $wfdpl.EnumerateDefinitions($false)$ctx.Load($wfdefs)$ctx.Load($web)$ctx.ExecuteQuery()$webUrl = $web.Url

If, like me, you don't want to give the users you support the opportunity to mistakenly (or mischievously) delete the list item whilst in the form interface, then this is for you.Just insert the following script into the Custom CSS box of the Form Settings, before the other CSS already in there (so, it's easy to find):On-Premise SharePoint 2013 Nintex Forms:/*hide delete button in ribbon for Display form*/#Ribbon.ListForm.Display.Manage-LargeMedium-1{display:none;}/*hide delete button in ribbon for Edit form*/#Ribbon.ListForm.Edit.Actions.DeleteItem-Large{display:none;

Here at Nintex we like to make life nice and easy for our users and those new to Nintex Workflow (2010 & 2013). This month is a new feature to help you workflow admins see exactly what's going on with all your lovely Nintex Workflows with the introduction of Workflow Inventory. You will need the appropriate administration access to access the different views. What Is It? Workflow Inventory is a Site Setting area which will lay out in detail all the List and Site Workflows published to that Site, all sites in a Site Collection or all Sites in the Farm;  providing in an easy to understand list of the following information -Site Collection (Farm view - Workflow Enterprise) Site Name (Site Collection inventory view - Workflow Enterprise )

Since the end of last year Nintex for Office365 is also available in various data-centers around the globe (Europe, Australia, Japan). If you're a new customer you can choose the data-center where your tenant will be hosted. I makes sense to choose a data-center that is close to your location - and that is close to the region where your Office365 tenant is being hosted. If you already previously created a Nintex for Office365 tenant, this tenant is hosted in the US. But the good news: you can migrate that tenant to another data-center! So in my case I'm located in Germany and my Office365 tenant is hosted in Europe. So each time I access the Workflow-Designer in Office365 I have to make round-trips to the US - a round-trip within Europe would be faster. The actual migration of the tenant was a no-brainer. Just contact either Nintex or your trusted Nintex Partner of choice and the migration will be prepared and executed in the background. After a couple of

Accelerate Sales and Business Results with Nintex DrawloopJoin Andrew Swanson and David Stephen from the Drawloop team and learn how Sales Cloud customers have transformed document generation into a data-driven process that accelerates sales and business results, and empowers employees to do more of what they do best.Generate any documents from Sales Cloud at the click of a button, by batch, or workflow Use your data-model to drive document processes from marketing content, sales quotes, contracts, order forms, new customer onboarding and account management Use complex Excel calculations to drive real-time metrics and profitability summaries back into Salesforce dashboards and Wave Ensure compliance while streamlining new sales rep training Run in Lightning, Salesforce Classic, and on your mobile device with Salesforce1

BackgroundIn our organisation we have the nintex workflow actions tightly controlled as follows:Untrained users:  no access to any actions Trained users:  access to subset of actions SharePoint support users:  full access to all actionsThe reason for this is governance (which I will get round to blogging about one day I am sure).  We do not allow the trained users any actions that can loop that with poor configuration could maybe bring down the environment or affect the performance in some way. ProblemThese trained users almost always have a requirement for a "reminder" workflow of sorts, to notify people when a document is due for review, or if a task is outstanding and x days overdue (like many users on the community).  Anyone on the community with this requirement will have been sent by me to my blog post

The idea of a "dashboard" comes up a lot and for me, I generally cringe at the thought. Not because it is difficult to implement, but because it is difficult to implement well enough so that the customer uses it frequently enough to get value out of it. Scenario:I recently had to deal with such a case with an internal customer where they wanted a form to be submitted on a child site and then certain pieces be promoted up to a parent site list upon submission. So how do we accomplish this? I used Web Services within a Site Collection workflow that is triggered by a content type. Simple enough, but requires a bit of knowledge in regards to what is expected and what to look for (a lot of trial and error ) Setup:I am not going to go into too much detail about Content Types, but I recommend k

Following my previous post on Using OAuth 2.0 to access other cloud services from NWC, we are going to use the same principal but apply to Microsoft Graph API. Microsoft Graph exposes multiple APIs from Office 365 and other Microsoft cloud services through a single endpoint: https://graph.microsoft.com. That means we will be able to integrate to Office 365 Sharepoint, OneDrive, and other Azure and Office 365 related services from NWC with single Microsoft Graph API. As you may be aware for now, the key challenge to connect to other cloud services will be more on the setup and getting the Access Token, which I

Nintex form - Incorrect validation rule making Attachments disappear (or overwritten).I had an interesting issue raised today by one of the customers I deal with regularly and thought I would share here. Why is the attachments added to the list via the nintex form being removed or over written?After wracking my brain (and google) I did not find an answer.Taking a step I went through the form validation rules I found two of them had been incorrectly configured (using the isNullOrEmpty Runtime Function).Once correcting the validation rule, the attachments stayed in the form / list.isNullOrEmpty(Title) I hope this helps others out there who are struggling with this.

The client had an extensive form that needed to go online to improve the process. It's a variation to contract form that feeds into many external systems. Currently the form is owned by HR and due to poor process management, the data from this form rarely reaches other departments for updating their information, for example IT require the form for updates to Active Directory. Anyway, a small but fiddly part of this form was to create a Working Pattern control where the user could submit the standard weekly working hours of the employee. The employee might also have fortnightly or even monthly working patterns so they needed to be able to submit more than just a weeks pattern. The only output required for this in terms of data, was the total hours for the week, as this, combined with other data in the form could be used to calculate the employees annual salary. It's a fairly simple control, but because there is no such thing as a "time" field

E-Signature technology has been around for years, allowing people to get documents filled out and signed in no time. When organizations consider e-signatures, they’re looking for a solution that offers authentication, security, and even workflow customization. Our latest  eSignLive for Nintex SharePoint connector to automate your workflows. Pairing electronic signatures with Nintex removes paper from your existing workflows by adding e-signatures for a fully end-to-end digital approval process. Whether you need an NDA or an HR business contract signed, eSignLive for Nintex SharePoint

Panels.Panels never change. But what DOES change is who can see them, and when. This is what initiated my most recent client request: "Make sure that when the Manager goes into the form, that they can only see the Manager panel, and the Software panel - and not the other two."  "Simple!" I replied. Our panels are JavaScript controlled beauties; a sight to behold. Easy to hide using Nintex rules. I spoke too soon. "Also," they began, "Ensure that the Manager is taken directly to the Manager panel when they open their notification link." My endless Googling and Nintexoogling of "target panel" was fruitless; if nothing else, I hope this blog will cement the words "target panel" forever in the sea

Some of you may have noticed (if your device automatically updates your apps of course) that a new version of Nintex Mobile has been released. For those of you that haven't been automatically updated... what are you waiting for? Head over to your friendly neighborhood app store of choice and download the latest version of of Nintex Mobile now! So what exactly is so new and powerful about this latest release of Nintex Mobile anyhow? Well, here is a breakdown of the features for each version that was released: Nintex Mobile for iOS (Apple) v4.5 Nintex Mobile for Android (Samsung, et. al) v4.5 Nintex Mobile for Windows v4.4 Added support for Tasks in Nintex Workflow Cloud Added support for Tasks in Nintex Workflow Cloud

With InspireX nearly upon us, I spent some time yesterday looking over all of the sessions that are going on. There is a ton of cool content and session going on over the course of the conference, and I have to say, I feel like I am going to miss out on something! A big announcement or cool session that I just cannot make it to! I cannot be in more than one place no matter how much my wife tries to make me! So I got thinking, "how can I keep track of everything that is going on and get the cool, exciting news in real time?" TWITTER! Now am I not one for being glued to my phone and miss what is right in front of me, so how can I get the tweets I care and want to know about in a place that I can read through when I want. Then it dawned on me, why not use a FLOW! I can setup a Flow to search the "twitter-sphere" for #InspireX, #Nintex, and #NINx17 and create an item in a list within my tenant! So let's take a look at how incredibly easy this is to setup!

SharePoint is a great tool to collaborate and track document changes. But, have you ever had the requirement, that a form should be submitted "anonymously"?Some customers know the princip of inboxes, where you can place a complaint anonymously.Since this is a bit "not featured by design" in SharePoint, I would like to share my solution approach.(There are others, as you can read here: Anonymous Form Submission but in my case, I don't want to delete submitted items.) First, I create a new Site-Workflow.For this scenario, I need two variables. One is for the complaint-message and one is an optional textfield, where you could enter your name, if you like.(Please note: "Show on start form") Secondly, I edit the start form with Nintex Forms. The fields are connected to the corresponding var

I just wanted to take a minute an share a really simple solution that drove a lot of value within an organization. It is these simple processes that provide a big value and quick wins and a nice ROI to show the power of what Nintex can provide. You do not always have to tackle the most complex solutions to get a reward back. This company has a reward system for its employees. It was a paper process where users would go to a SharePoint Online document library, download a copy of a word document, fill it out and then email it to HR. This is done to keep the award nominations private. Not entering data twice, but still could be greatly improved. To streamline this process and still have a hard copy record we created a Custom SharePoint Online List. A Nintex Form which was also mobile, was created to make the UI better as well as push the from out to our users mobile devices.  Other than keeping this form fairly simple we did use a form redirect so then the u

There are different reasons for different IT teams to keep a version of the product unchanged for a length of time. When that length of time expands years it is natural to be cautious when it finally comes down to upgrading the product in your environment. Nintex designs are by their nature almost limitless, so how do we prepare for an update when we don't know what sort of impact it will or will not have on the production workflows. The simple answer is to test it. You will need to run your designs on the desired Nintex version to be confident that they function as intended. This blog goes over some of the important 2010 and 2013 products changes and considerations.  Section:1: General product enhancement.2: Action/Control updates.3: Upgrade Strategy4: Rollback options.  1: General product enhancement. Topology enhancements.