News and Guidelines

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 approved, but no purchase occurs because the workflow is being tested. Production: Intended for the production phase; the workflow or form operates on or affects live bu

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 it containing a flexi task.I also added an item to all lists and star

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 close as soon as the data was entered and "OK" selected. The next step would be for a user to go to the list of tasks and open a task. Creating a form with tabs which would stay on screen and interact with the workflow, is a problem for us which we need to solve. Answer:  This depends on what they are looking to do.  If they are wanting one form with individual tabs that progress multiple tasks, this would not be recommended.  Currently task forms are created for each individual task within a workflow and

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 this now applies to you..  So let me get to some of the basics.. Before you can start to see anything you need to get your Nintex Hawkeye tenant and connect your Office 365 environment to it. If you don't have a tenant, head to Try Nintex for 30 Days - Free!  to request your Nintex Hawkeye tenant. If you already have the license as part of your subscription shoot an email to Licensing@Nintex.com with your Tenant ID and they will activate it for you. You can find the Tenant ID on the "Nintex data sources" pageWhile

Stronger Together - Nintex Workflow Cloud and Nintex Workflow for Office 365. Many of us have been asking for feature such as scheduled workflow in Sharepoint for Office 365, that has not made available by Nintex Workflow for Office 365 today. Well, a scheduled workflow is pretty straight forward and easy to setup in Nintex Workflow Cloud, we can create a scheduled workflow in Nintex Workflow Cloud to trigger a workflow in Sharepoint for Office 365. That gives us the solution of scheduling a workflow in Sharepoint for Office 365. To demonstrate how that works, Nintex Workflow for Office 365 - Site Workflow1. I have created a Site Workflow in Sharepoint for Office 365 environment. Here is how "MySiteWorkflow" looks like in Nintex workflow for Office 365 environment: 2. The "MySiteWorkflow" takes one Initiation Variable as defined below, when the workflow started manually, it will prompt users with the initiation form for users to provide input for the "listname" initiation variable.  3.

Here is a question for you: "How complex a business process can be solved by Nintex Workflow Cloud?", well I think I do have an interesting answer for that, it solves business processes that is as complicated as the famous Farmer-Wolf-Goat-Cabbage cross a river puzzle.  There are many programming languages out there, everyone will have its own strengths and focuses. You might find it easy to solve the old classic puzzle such as the "Farmer-Wolf-Goat-Cabbage cross a river" with much lesser code in Prolog or Lisp that is associated with Artificial Intelligence than a Java program. It will be interesting to find out solving the same puzzle without even writing a piece of code with Nintex Workflow Cloud. For those who have not came across the "Farmer-Wolf-Goat-Cabbage cross a river" puzzle, you could simply do a search on the web to find enough article and solution for it. This is just a perfect puzzle trying to understand a real world business process is, it has:  Objective:To move all th

Products: Nintex Workflow 2013, Nintex Workflow 2010 We received a request the other day to bulk update Workflow Constants. While it is easy to import-export Workflow constants, it is not a trivial matter to update a great many of them. Typically updating involves logging into Central Administration and/or each site and updating the credentials manually. Here is a method that takes some of the work out of updating these values by allowing you to edit an exported Workflow constants file using a specific format and persist these changes back into the environment in an automated fashion. Things you will need: An export of Workflow Constants in file format. Some kind of XML Viewer (Notepad++ is what I prefer). A copy of this script (below and attached). Steps: Export the Workflow Constants you want updated and save them to a file (More information here: NWAdmin Operations - Nintex Workflow 2013) Open the File in an XML Viewer. This should present you with one long line. Save a copy of this

Dear Drawloop fans,We've been busy here on the Nintex Drawloop team, so we wanted to share with you where we are going and what we are going to be doing in the upcoming months.  If you find yourself at these events, we would love to see you! 3/29 - Salesforce "Connected Leaders:  Contract and Document Apps to Do More, Sell More, Close More" webinar.  Nintex Drawloop customer testimony is being shared. Register here. 4/4 – Salesforce World Tour DC Register Here 4/4 - PublicSector Networking Reception, following Salesforce World Tour DC Register Here 4/20 - Salesforce WorldTour Toronto Register here 5/18 - Salesforce WorldTour London, register here 5/31 - Salesforce WorldTour Boston, event details 6/15 - Salesforce WorldTour Chicago, event details To see where else Nintex is going to be, check out our Events & Webinars page.   Happy Spring! Yours truly,T yearofeinstein‌ 

On-premise customer, trying to Question:On the web service action, what is the replacement for getting external data into a site for use on a form? Let’s say we have a customer list in oracle or SQL on prem. How do we get that list to a site to be used in a drop down on a form? Especially when it might be used across multiple sites and multiple site collections and must be up to date? Answer from Brad OrlukThe absolute best approach here would be to use BCS in SharePoint to surface that Oracle data in an external data column. This way we show it in the form using our BCS control. Otherwise, they would need to use the Web Request / Execute SQL action in workflow to pull the data from the database and put it into a list and then use a list lookup for the dropdown. This would need to be done as a scheduled workflow so that the data in the list stays relatively up to date with what’s in the database. Answer from Dan BurkeFrom what I looked into, what looks like the only way to do this onli

This post is a review of the march 2017 release. What is included in this post is my personal observation/opinion. *** Nintex Workflow Cloud ***ChangesAddition of ‘Conditional start’ feature. Addition of ‘Share a link’ feature. A new connector action. Addition of ‘Conditional start’ featureThis is my favorite release feature. Keep on going with the good work! If this feature is available depends on the connector. I have not found a list about it but it can be easily checked. The available conditional start options depend on the connector and event. The Nintex connector does not have a conditional start but connectors like ‘Dropbox Business’, ‘Microsoft OneDrive for Business’ and ‘Twilio’ do. Below is a screenshot of a conditional start (Microsoft OneDrive for Business):   Do check if your requested conditional start is indeed possible. So has the option ‘Size (bytes)’ (Microsoft OneDrive for Business) no ‘greater than’ or ‘smaller than’ option making this start event variable a bit use

I have been doing a lot of "selling" Nintex to different business areas within my company lately as we gear up for the ever-looming exodus to "The Cloud", and have faced the same question more times than I really thought I would have. "What is Nintex?" The question is simple enough, and I could go on for hours about it, but how do you sum it up in a sentence, or a word? When you think of Nintex, what jumps to mind? What is your "elevator speech" for Nintex? I have heard everything from "they do workflow and forms, right?" to "they do some stuff in the SharePoint space", but that hardly does Nintex any justice. For me, I always gravitate towards "improvement".  From existing workflows and processes to forms, it is a tool for improvement. It allows us to improve how we do our day-to-day as well as changes the way we look at approaching existing and new ventures. I think about how I can incorporate a process into other areas of the business using Nintex and how it will improve the overall

Well hopefully you have already had a quick look at It's here... Nintex Document Generation and had a play around with the Doc Gen action in Office 365. With this post I'm going to go a little deeper and try to explain how to get repeating section data from a Nintex Form into a table in a document. Kok Koon Gan​ just posted a great post as well detailing Using Document Generation to create Excel Report from List Items​. Continuing on from It's here... Nintex Document Generation  I'm going to use the same example and template, but just change it up, just a little. The thing you have to get in your head early in this process is that to have a table in a document you have to build up a collection of data that can be inserted in.. Now for those of you that have worked with Collections, you'll know that it is just an array.. Eg One, Two, Three, Four etc. So knowing this, how do you get multiple columns into a table ? We have dictionaries, these are close to what we need, but we can't use th

In this blog post I’d like to show, how to use the Nintex Forms “Web Request” control together with the Google Distance Matrix API to automatically calculate the distance between two cities and the estimated duration for that trip.At the end the form will look like this (Edit mode):Setup Google Distance Matrix APIBefore the implementation of the SharePoint list and the Nintex form, some simple steps need to be performed, to be able to use the Google Distance Matrix API. The documentation of the Distance Matrix API can be found here: Developer's Guide  |  Google Maps Distance Matrix API  |  Google Developers The most important point is the generation of necessary API key, the process for this is described in the “Get a key” section of the documentation:After reading the documentation I configured the following request:https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/distancematrix/xml?origins=Hamburg+22763&destinations=Muenchen+80331&mode=driving&language=de-DE&key=*****************

Hi,I got the requirement to design a multilingual form the other day.Thanks toVadim Tabakman‌ for describing a good way to realize such a form.Since my customer is thinking about translating the whole SharePoint-Plattform, Oceanik came into discussion.Unfortunately, I haven't found any discussion about Nintex Forms and Oceanik in combination yet so I decided to share my learnings here. To learn about the capabilities of Oceanik, please visit their website here: OCEANIK for SharePoint 2010, 2013 and 2016 - Oceanik    First, I installed Oceanik on my test environment and activated it on a plain SiteCollection. For this test, I translate terms from Englisch to German.To check whether the solution is working or not, I put "Go-Live" on my homepage. Now I can switch between the two languages and see the result. So far so good.As you can see in the left navigation, I also created a list called "Expenses" and translated that to "Spesen". Now for my next test, I use the term "expenses" in a lab

Set Workflow Variable is a fundamental workflow action that allows you to assign a value to a variable, based on the current place and decisions made in the workflow process. You could always create multiple variables within the action, but up till now you could only set one variable at a time.  This approach meant that every time you wanted to set a variable value, you would need an individual instance of the Set Workflow Variable action. For instance, if a workflow had 2 variables (discount price and sales value) that were set in 2 different process stages(proposal and negotiation), you would have had to use 4 instances of this action. This also meant you required a lot of canvas space in the workflow designer.   You may have noticed all the past tense in this discussion. That’s because new enhancements of the Set Workflow Variable action now allow you to assign values to up to 20 variables. Revisiting the earlier scenario, if the workflow designer needs to set 2 variables progressiv

You can now assign taxonomy during form submission, in the cloud! Nintex Forms for Office 365 is introducing the new Managed Metadata Control that allows you to do just that. This control allows consistent allocation of metadata, in a form submission context. This results in improved content discoverability and metadata enabled navigation to underlying lists and libraries.SharePoint’s Managed Metadata is information about information. For example, a product’s type identification number and preferred location can be its metadata. You can organize the metadata structure in a way that makes sense to your business context and use metadata when aggregate or searching for the said item. For more information on this concept, read this introductory article on Managed Metadata in Office 365.Once you have setup your taxonomy, implementing the new Managed Metadata control in your form is simple. I will take you through a quick end-to-end textual/pictorial demonstration.We will start with the list

We've all been there haven't we? You've got a multi-stage workflow, your director has approved it, your manager has approved it, and then **ERROR** Something goes wrong. Maybe your next approver has left the company since the workflow was started, or there's an erroneous value in your variable that your SharePoint column won't accept. Either way, you've got into a position where you've already had approval from a director (or anyone) once, you don't really want to have to ask them again. On long running workflows this can be a real pain. So we introduced a setup that allowed us to "Pick up where we left off" (or were kicked off as the case might have been). The State Machine is a brilliant action for for these staged workflows that transition through a number of different states and the Switch Action allows us leverage these states. Take the following example:An item is created, to achieve approval it must go through 3 stages on a State Machine.Manager Approval Director Approval Task t

So, I recently realized that Nintex Forms caused attachments to download rather than open in Word/Excel Online regardless of the setting you have in the site collection. We had some users for which this wasn't acceptable. We toyed with the idea of giving them a document library and having them upload things there and then just link to them, but I really wanted to make this work more intuitively so I came up with this workaround.I took most of my workflow inspiration from Attachment links in 'Send e-mail'  by Rasmus Nielsen which was based on this SlideShare from Alan Richards. I made a few tweaks and then had to figure out how to nicely display it on the Nintex Form. On my list I created a Hyperlink Column for each Attachment "slot" essentially. I built my workflow to accomodate up to 4 attachments, so I added 4 Hyperlink fields, named Link to Attachments, Attachments2, Attachments3, Attachments4. Now, onto the workflow, first, these are all the variables I used:  And then, here's the

Prompted by Cassy Freeman‌ and this question raised by Chintan Desai‌, 2 workflow instance executes at same time‌, I thought I would share how I got around this very problem.My scenario is slightly different as I wanted the new reference number displayed on the new form for users info even before the record saved. Initially i thought us JavaScript to get the next number from the GenerateID list and then use workflow on save to increment the next number.This actually made Murphy's law (read the rest of the comments on the question!!) more likely to happen which was pointed out to me by Cassy Freeman‌ in a workshop so i had to come up with something else. Solution:When the new form is loaded use Javascript to get the next number and then increment by one and then write back to the GenerateID list immediately. This will ensure that the next number will be different and therefore no chance of Murphy getting his way!!! The fun part:Title field set to have a Client ID JavaScipt variable of v

As we know you can not open Nintex Workflow Designer for an UDA at Farm level in all versions of the product. So that begs the question how do we update an UDA at Farm Level if we need to change it? This is a question a Partner had and they shared their workaround with us. So I am sharing it with the community as I see it as being very useful. The official method is using two farms. Editing the UDA in Farm A at site level then publishing at Farm Level in Farm B. This is not particularly convenient for single farm deployments. The reason behind this is that for an UDA to exist in a farm it needs a unique ID. Creating UDA's at site level to import over the farm level ones does not work since they have different ID's.  Details on how UDA's are identified. The UDA has a unique ID and Static GUID      - These can be referenced in the Nintex Config DB under the UserDefinedActions table.  The workaround  In Nintex Workflow 2010, 2013 and 2016, you can circumvent this limitation by editing an

The much awaited Nintex Lazy Approval action for Office 365 SharePoint online is here making your approval process SUPER FAST! All we have to do now is to simply type 'Ok' or a few other accepted keywords (covers almost all words I could think of for saying yes or no) in the assigned task notification and hit SEND. Right from your inbox without going to your SharePoint environment.Here's something I tried and sharing for you to try in your cloud as well(weather permitting ofcourse - just kidding!)App Requirements:Your organization has purchased a few training resource licenses and your rock-star team of devs/engineers/architects/students/runners/movers/shakers...well you get the idea, want a process in place that will track requests allowing users to avail training for two weeks and then release the hold, so others can book the same.Solution:Create a list, setup a workflow, assign a task when resource is requested. Pause the process for two weeks, then continue the process by assign a

Good day, It's my first Blog here.  I will show you a Nintex "Feedback" form where I will add a panel to use it as a progress bar. The form contains a set of questions (Choice controls). I will use the following techniques in order to accomplish what I need: 1-CSS2-Bootsrap font (glyphicons-halflings-regular)3-jQuery Step 1: Let's create the form containing the following.   a-A random number of choices with the below settings: b-A panel (Our progress bar) with the below settings:Step 2: Download the glyphicons-halflings-regular font with the (.woff .woff2 .eot .svg .ttf) extensions:Step 3: Add the following JavaScript file (I named it "progressive.js") with the below code to the "Site Assets" library:Step 4: Add the following CSS file (I named it "progressive.css") with the below code to the "Site Assets" library:Step 5: Let's add references to the files in our form:Step 6: The "Site Assests" Library will look like:Step 7: My form will look like :Attached you can find all the needed fi

Updated Please refer to this KB article  https://support.nintex.com/Mobile/Other/How_to_expose_Nintex_Mobile_through_your_firewall Last week I was at the Nintex InspireX conference in Las Vegas, and I have to say that it was one of the better conferences I've attended in the last 9 or so years, since jumping ship from being a Lotus Domino guy to a SharePoint Guy. Now I'm not being bias being a Nintex employee, or because I was a speaker. As we were treated no differently than anyone else. It was the experience of everyone being open, and the accessibility of customers and partners for frank discussions. The feedback was constructive, which I truly appreciated, and I thank you all that attended that spoke with me and or any of my colleagues.. There were some golden nuggets of information I took away. One of these items was something I saw as soon as myself and Tim Walwyn presented the Nintex Mobile session on the first day. A lot of people approached me during the conference, and stated

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.   ...   What Havoc Did This Cause? This workflow resets all of the document number references for a project. This means that all of the document numbers generated after 3:28PM were erroneous and had to be changed via individual workflows on each record, which also have their own sub-processes to run.  Oh, and, I didn't find about this until the next day

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 Level lookup: The five lookups all point to the same list. The Source view is the first "filter" as it breaks the list into five parts. The Parent ID is filtered by a Calculated Value control called fltShaft: The oth