News and Guidelines

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 ) List Name (with a hyperlink to navigate to that list) Workflow Name (with a hyperlink to navigate to the workflow) Workflow Type - list, site and reusable templates (and for Nintex for Projects Server those workflow types as well). Modified By Modifie

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 days you'll get feedback: your

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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 Site Workflow - Document Review Date Approaching Reminders‌ or to the solution on Nintex Xchange™‌ Document Review Reminder Process‌.  However, these users are not allowed any loop

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 knowing how to use Content Types and how to apply workflows to them. Perhaps that will be another blog for another day. This is what I am working with: Master List on Parent Site - this list is used to b

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 have provided a sample on getting that up with Google OAuth 2.0 API, I will provide the steps to setup access to Microsoft Graph API later in this post. Let us first take a look from the NWC end, a workflow we going to automate from Nintex Mobile submitting a new user request, the request gets submitted to NWC and triggers the call to Azure Active Directory API via the Microsoft G

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, I took the approach of creating dropdowns t

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 lets you obtain secure and compliant and 100% legal e-signatures for all of your documents. The eSignLive for Nintex SharePoint connector is currently available for download. Check out how easy it is to add e-signatures to your workflows: In this example, I’ll walk you through how you can add e-signatures to an existing HR on-boarding workflow. Create a document template you would like to use to send out f

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 search terms so that I can help future Rhias of the world come to this solution: Step 1) Determine your code word. For me, it was "managers" and "software". We will focus on "managers" for this example. Step 2) Ye olde JavaScript. Plop this into your Custom JavaScript settings: NWF$( document ).ready

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 Added support for Tasks in Nintex Workflow Cloud Add support to capture form and task metadata Add support to capture form and task metadata General bug fixes and improvements Added greater support for multitasking with support for iOS Split View and landsca

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!Create a listThis is pretty straigh

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 variable. Thirdly, I insert two Workflow Actions. The Action Set is needed to run all child actions using the credentials of the user who published the workflow. And that's it. In my case, I use the Nintex "

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 user will never touch the actual

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.From Nintex Workflow 2010 version 2.4.2.0 up and Nintex Workflow 2013 version 3.1.2.0 up a new solution was added to the installer in the form of Nintexworkflow201

A slight variation on Retrieve cities from a database post by Pamela Denchfield‌ where Pamela uses a dropdown to create a cascading dropdown filter on a SQL Request control. We have a lonnnnnnnngggggggg list of suppliers who our users can select from when they want to request a new product.We've cleansed this list as best we can but it still numbers thousands and it's not fun for our users to have to scroll through the dropdown to try and find the needle in the haystack. Because there's no set choice of parent values that would allow us to do a cascading dropdown, we want to let our users search for the suppliers. First add a text box to the form and give it a name, in our case I'm it "SupplierSearch". Then we simply add our SQL Request Control to our formand fill in the db detailsThe important part for us is the Query.select name from vw_sp_CleansedSuppliers WHERE name LIKE '%SupplierSearch%'‍‍We're just using the LIKE operator and wildcards either side of the reference to our text bo

I recently had request from a client to show current items in a list for users to preview as they created a new request.   The actual requirement is listed below.Requirement:Allow users to view list items from the current list.  Users should be able to enter the “ID” of the item they want to see in a field on the form, and the form should process and return the fields of the item they specified.Diagnosis:I know some people may be thinking about using views, filtering fields and using a query, or perhaps even using a lookup field to achieve the results.  While there are a few different ways to achieve this that I explored, some with extra code, I decided to use a built in function that was native to Nintex that seems to fit the bill quite easily.Solution:The solution has a few pieces working together and could be greatly complicated depending on your list and form view, but here is what I did to show this functionality:Current List Form List View Labels Single line of text field (used t

A person’s name is the sweetest sound to them in any language.  Even in a crowded noisy room, you’ll probably hear your name called out over all the din. Can you relate to when you share a name with someone?  Someone calls out your name “Hey Chris” and you and a different Chris look over at that person and wave?  A little bit embarrassing if it’s not you and a little bit inefficient.  The world would be more efficient if we had unique names but conversations would be difficult: “Hi fingerprint ID 0010010101”“Oh how’s it going fingerprint ID 1001010110?”“Good man.  Good.  Happy New Year to you and your wife fingerprint ID 010111010111” It’s much better when we can use terms such as Cassy, Andrew and Fernando* right?The development world is a bit like this.  Beneath the scenes, everything is referred to using a unique code but we as humans can’t handle this so we’ve made life easier for ourselves by giving items names that make sense to us. Where am I going with this post?  How should we

Nintex Mobile now supports split-screen multitasking for iOS users! With the new supported capability, you don't have to choose between having the Nintex app or another app open. Instead, you can have two apps side by side.   How can split-screen multitasking improve your Nintex Mobile experience? Let's say you get an email with information scattered throughout. You need to input information from the email into a form in the Nintex Mobile app. Rather than constantly switching between the email app and the Nintex Mobile app, you can use split-screen multitasking to easily fill in the form.  As the example image shows, you can quickly identify the needed information and enter it in the form all at the same time.   Example image showing both apps on one screen. The Nintex Mobile app is on the left and the email app is on the right.  For more information on split-screen multitasking, see the Apple article About Multitasking on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch and the detailed YouTube vide

As you may have noticed, in SharePoint , when you publish a workflow on a list or document library, this magical platform creates a status column for your workflow. Wow, fantastic! Oh wait... this is great, isn't it? Well, not exactly.  These columns are created so that when you use the Set Workflow Status action a string of text can be stored that references the instantiated workflow. This is great as it allows me to surface, on the default list view, details about the current progress of the workflow. So, if that's the case, why wouldn't this workflow status column be helpful?  Well, the problem you'll end up running into is that as you build several workflows or have a large number of columns on this list you'll start seeing somewhat undesirable artifacts in the Workflow Designer under Item Properties when you attempt to insert a reference.  What exactly would this undesirable artifact be? Well as you can see below, I have 4 workflows published on my Leave Requests list: But when I

We get this question a lot that why some Runtime Rules work on Android but not on iOS, Windows or Windows Phone. So if you have created a validation rule or formatting rule in Nintex Forms which works on Android but not the other mobile devices, most probably the issue is that you have used a custom JavaScript syntax instead of Nintex Form functions somewhere in your rule.In most of the cases we have seen, users use == instead of equals(), > instead of greaterThan or < instead of smallerThan functions.For example if you are writing a function to check age which is entered in AgeTextBox control you have to write it like this “greaterThan(18,AgeTextBox)”. This would work on all platforms but if you write it as “AgeTextBox > 18″ it would NOT work and is basically not supported.To make sure your Rules work properly on all platform use the functions provided in by Nintex Form and avoid writing any custom JavaScript function in your Rules.

Have you ever wanted to create a Form Rule based on whether or not your form was in New, Edit, or Display mode respectively?  It turns out you can do exactly that without too much effort.  In this example I will show you how to create a Validation Rule to throw an error on the form if the user selects a date that is in the past, but only while the form is in New mode. Let's jump right in! First create your form and drag a date picker control onto the design surface: in this case we'll name it EndDate. Next let's add a Validation Rule to the EndDate control as depicted in the following:By using the formula builder (next to the condition box) I was able to select "Is New Mode" from the Common tab.   "Is New Mode" return true if the form is in New mode and false otherwise. "Is Display Mode" and "Is Edit Mode" are also available under the Common tab.We complete the rule by checking if "EndDate" is less than "Current Date". Note: EndDate was selected from Named Controls tab and Current Date

In a recent release of Nintex, we added always on functionality, but you must also update your connection string when turning on this feature.  Below are the details on the update, as well as a short "How To" for the connection string.  Product version: 3.1.10.0Database version: 3.1.3.0Release date: 2 November 2016 EnhancementsAllow additional connection string parameters for Nintex Content Databases e.g configure SQL Server 2012 as AlwaysOn Below is the Power Shell script below you will need to use to update your parameters for the Connection String used for the Nintex Workflow Configuration Database. Step 1.  Please navigate to your Central Administration> Nintex Workflow Management> Database Setup. Step 2. Retrieve the Connection String for the Configuration Database. Paste string into script within Power Shell script. Add the additional parameters you would like. Only update the section within the double quotes, leave all other aspects of this script alone (including the 2007

Introduction: The objective of this blog is to share how you can change the notification to the users who are newly assigned in the assignment matrix list during runtime and continue the workflow to move ahead. We came up a situation working with the current project very recently. Scenario: For example: Suppose you have three states say State1, State2 and State3 and you have assigned three users for these three states in the assignment matrix say User1 for State1, User2 for State2 and User3 for State3. Now when the workflow enters into each state it sends a notification to that State user. That notification we can display into the dashboard by filtering the task item for that logged in user from where that logged in user can operate on the associated List form (Remember not the task form) and submit the form. Now, if the workflow enters inside the State2 it will throw the notification to that User2. But for any reason User2 left the company and the item that he/she needs to fill up lef

In one of our projects, we needed to implement a solution to track the visits of sales representatives in form of a visit report. Most of the times there are multiple visit reports for one visit, because multiple representatives attend a visit.In those visit reports the sales representatives should say if they were the driver at the visit or only a passenger. It’s of course possible that not all representatives drive with the same car, for example because of different starting points or follow-up visits. But if they have the same starting point, the same destination and overall there’s no reason why they should not drive together, it probably doesn’t make sense, that they do not drive all together in one car.In these cases, there’s a chance for optimization and we needed a workflow that can discover these optimization possibilities. This workflow needs to be able to identify specific duplicates (visit reports) in a list.In this blog post I’d like to show you how I set up this workflow