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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

One of my developers recently contacted me about long term delegation not functioning properly. Because we have multiple clients each with their own URL (host named site collections) we could not use the our of the box people picker provided with delegation and had to build our own form that present a To and From drop down of users in a list. The list is updated each morning from the AD OU of that client. When trying to do a long term delegation the user would get an email with the following message:  Users were using the feature but long term delegation wasn't happening. Current tasks were being delegated fine for all sites. Our users do not have admin rights, and in fact they have pretty limited permissions on their sites. Just enough to get work done. So here's what we found out and how we resolved this problem. First, we discovered that delegation uses both the clients Nintex content database and the Nintex Configuration database depending on how delegation was being done. For exis

There is a known licensing schema oddity when upgrading from Forms Standard to Forms Enterprise, that could cause issues for a few customers running older versions of our Forms product.  If you are running Nintex Forms Version 1.9 or less, for SharePoint 2010, or version 2.7 for SharePoint 2013, then you will need to upgrade your environment first, to the latest build of Forms, using a Standard Forms license in the environment, then then import your Forms Enterprise license. Everything moving forward will then work as expected. 

For those that want to activate the new Document Generation feature in your SharePoint environment, here is a quick video on how to get everything configured in your SharePoint Central Administration: Video Link : 1328  Check out Chris' blog post for an overview of the new Document Generation feature here:  As a reminder, you'll need to be running either Nintex for SharePoint 2013, or Nintex for SharePoint 2016 to use the Document Generation action, and you will need to be on at least build 3.2.0.0 or 4.1.0.0 respectively to be able to add the action to your workflows. This is an amazing new feature for Nintex Workflow, and I can't wait to start working with it myself!

Greetings!With the new year, we're excited to announce that with the latest release, designers are able to transport workflows between and within tenants through the export and import feature. Since General Availability, partners and customers have told us they want to:Finish in other tenancies: Build the majority of the workflow design within one tenancy and finish the workflow design within another tenancy. Build for reuse: Create a basic workflow design containing common parts used in most workflows. Share workflow designs: Transfer workflows between designers (within or between tenancies). With export and import, we've implemented a token key based approach to sharing workflows between Nintex Workflow Cloud tenancies. What are the mechanics of exporting and importing a workflow?On exporting workflows:Only published workflows can be exported. A unique import key is generated on request. The key has a validity of 72 hours / 3 days from the moment of generation. This key can then be s

One of the skills every Nintex workflow designer has to learn is how to debug a workflow.  As Andrew Glasser‌ has pointed out in his post Tips on Debugging Workflows, the most common way to do this is to Log information to the History List.  In addition to this there are also times that I will use the Send Notification action to email myself some information at a certain point in the workflow.  In both cases however, these are typically only actions you want to take when developing/debugging a workflow, and don't need them once it's up and running in production.  So what's the best way to turn off these actions once you're ready to publish your workflow? The ProblemThe most straight forward way is to go through your workflow before you publish it and either disable or delete these actions.  However depending on how many actions you have, this could be very time consuming.  Plus, if you ever needed to debug something in the future, you'd need to edit the workflow and turn them all back

Nintex is by far the best workflow system in SharePoint 2013; but I’d like to suggest some things that would make it more world-class—best-in-breed for workflows. I have outlined the shortcomings of both SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio Workflows in an earlier article. My focus in this piece is how to improve on the good.  Below are four areas that could make a difference in enterprise capability:A Better Functions Library More Robust and Intuitive String Tools A “For Loop” with A Counter to control loops An Action Control to Split Individual Persons from Group Fields Better Functions Library My programming career stretches back 40 years, starting in 1977. Some of my first job assignments were calculating date fields.  I can’t believe I’m still doing date functions. When I needed a Julian Date function in my Nintex Workflow, I had to “roll my own”: Anyone know an easy way to calculate Julian Days in a Workflow The algorithm was not complex, but I had to spend productive time doing

When clicking Save or Publish on a workflow you may get an error message that reads: soap:ServerServer was unable to process request ---> The ConnectionString property has not been initialized.  The reason for this error, or one of them anyway, is that there is no Nintex Content Database defined for the site. I create my sites with PowerShell and very rarely will the script complete but no DB will be created. So when I got a message from my developer that there was an issue I was perplexed. The solution for this is to simply go and create the DB in Central Administration and associate the site. If you (or if you are an administrator and one of your workflow developers is doing all this) you may get the following error reported instead of the one above:   This will happen if you attempt to republish after the initial error. The reason is that a directory is created with your workflow name as the title at <your site url>/NintexWorkflows and it will be empty. To resolve this simp

This topic came up in a question asked by Sean Docherty (Ability to cancel a workflow) and I wanted to share some of the solutions that were discussed within in a bit more detail. More specifically, I want to highlight that there are multiple ways of doing the same thing, as pointed out by our own Cassy Freeman‌. The AskProvide users the ability to cancel a request and in-turn, terminate the workflow and any outstanding tasks. SolutionsApproach #1: Create a list level workflow that can be triggered and terminate the workflows and then delete the item.Approach #2: Create a site level workflow that can be called to terminate the workflows and delete the item in any list.Already we can see the differences, but each will provide us with the same end result. So let’s step through them both. Approach #1: List WorkflowFor this approach we can simply create a new workflow on the list (we will call it Delete Me). Within the workflow there are two actions; Terminate workflow and Delete item. In

Workflows are a way to get repetitive tasks done on SharePoint in the background.  Examples are Approval Workflows for a document, Task Completion Workflows where different steps require different processing, and Scheduled Reminders for work actions or events. Over my nine years of SharePoint, the most common workflows have been a few standard SharePoint Out-of-the-Box Workflows, SharePoint Designer Workflows, Visual Studio Workflows and of late, Nintex Workflows. Out-of-the-Box Workflows have never been flexible enough to adjust for even minor changes. Invariably, you need additional fields or a slightly altered logic flow to accommodate a business circumstance.  They are for the most part immutable. One of the major drawbacks of SharePoint Designer Workflows has been accessing to SharePoint Designer itself. Most installations have very restricted access to SharePoint Designer because the installation, itself, can be damaged in SharePoint Designer. The SharePoint Designer Workflow is

If you are looking to disable the Nintex Mobile App option from the drop down as shown below, you can   do the following:Navigate to your SharePoint CA Click on Nintex Forms Management Select Manage Live Mobile Access From this page disable "Disable Live Mobile Access" option Press OKThis will remove Nintex Mobile Apps option from the menu.

With Nintex Forms for SharePoint On Premises 2013, you can download a serialized version of your Nintex Form in XML format. By changing certain element values in the XML you can write an application that can update the text of your labels, switch the target URLs for your images, update CSS, and so on. This is helpful for instance if you need to create a batch update of the Nintex Forms for rebranding your site or to make other modest changes to the content of a large number of forms. In this post, I'm going to look at creating a C# console application to modify a single form. Table of Contents About the XML DOM and XPathIn working with XML, you are going to read the XML document into memory and interact with the XML document object model (DOM). If you are familiar with programming with JavaScript, you are probably already familiar with working with a document object model. Like the HTML DOM, the XML DOM represents the document as tree of nodes. A valid XML document has a root, and then

Nintex Mobile is written using native technologies on iOS, Android, Windows and Windows Phone platform which enables us to provide the best and most performant experience for users. In order to make this happen and provide you with the best experience, we had to do some minor sacrifices on supported HTML formatting and styling. For example we don't support any css tag on any mobile platform. The problem is the each platform may interpret css tags differently which will force you to have inconsistencies on how forms are rendered on each platform. This will result in users having to spend much more time designing and testing a mobile friendly forms. However based on your feedback we have been adding support for some basic HTML formatting in the Label Control. The following table summarizes HTML formatting support in the label control in Nintex Mobile:  HTML Formatting support per platform Bold Italics Underline Font Color Alignment iPhone

Exporting all forms on the siteThis is an useful feature that sometimes saves your work.Currently on Nintex Forms for Office 365 has not the feature to browse your past version and you cannot rollback a change. That 's when this feature ( exporting all forms ) is useful because you can use it daily and have all version saved. You can export all forms on the site to a local .zip file. The file contains a separate .nfp file for each list that includes a form. Each .nfp file includes all configured device layouts for the form.Exporting all forms on the site is useful for backing up forms, copying forms from one server to another, and using forms in other SharePoint lists.To export all forms on the siteNote: You must be a site owner to access this functionality.On the Site Contents page for your site, click the Nintex Forms for Office 365 app. On the upper right of the Nintex Forms for Office 365 page, click Nintex Forms Admin and then select Export All Forms on Site. Follow browser prompt

There are two great features while managing variables in Nintex Workflow for O365. When you are viewing Variables by clicking on the Variable button in the Design ribbon, you will see that the deletion button is Red or Grey. This denotes that the variable can or can't be deleted because it is in use in the workflow.From the image above, I can delete the variables 'colApprover' and 'colApproverValue' but I should not delete 'pgApprover' because it is in use in my workflow. The second feature is that if I click on to delete the in use 'pgApprover' variable, I will be prompted to see where the variable is in use in the workflow. These are two quick and easy ways to manage variables in workflows for Office 365! Note: a good way to make this even easier for yourself is to change the action's labels. Making them unique and meaningful not only help to identify the correct action to manage variables, but also to 'read' the workflow as if it was a Visio diagram. 

The Nintex teams have been at it this last couple of months working hard on some great new initiatives influenced heavily by the requirements of our current user base, and feedback from the InspireX conference that was held in February just past. Firstly, let us quickly chat about FBA support. This new capability will allow customers already using or planning to use FBA to log into SharePoint from Nintex Mobile. The latest version of Nintex Forms (2013 and 2010) is required (2.9.1.0 / 1.11.1.0), and after a small configuration change in Central Admin you will be off and running. Apple iOS and Android will be supported initially this month with Windows Desktop and Phone rolling out in the next release. There are 2 sections inside Manage FBA Mobile Access.Enable Form Based Authentication for Nintex Mobile: Users can enable/disable Nintex Mobile access to Nintex Forms inside SharePoint environment using Form Based Authentication. By default, it will be disable. Set Nintex Mobile Token Exp

This blog goes over the connection account prerequisites and considerations when designing in NWC. All this information was generated and reference on 05/12/2016  and is subject to change without notice from the vendors that provide the end-point service.   BoxThe prerequisite is to use a Business Plan account and it has an API call limit which should be taken into accountwhen designing workflows.   API account limits: StarterBox API Access: 25k actions per month Business Box API Access: 50K actions per month Enterprise Box API Access: 100K actions per month Pricing :Plans and Pricing | Box Referenced from: Box Developer Platform   (Error Code reference)   ----------------------------ShareFileThis connector requires you to allow Nintex Workflow Cloud to access your ShareFile account, you will be prompted when setting up the connector. API account limit: N/A ----------------------------DocuSignThe prerequisite is to enable the account to Send on behalf of functionality. SOBO functionali

I was on a call with a Nintex partner the other day and they had asked me how to hide actions from the workflow status. While I answer questions about complex workflow and forms scenarios for partners and customers alike, I often receive questions about more basic functionality like this as well, especially from non-technical users. So, in an effort to make sure that everyone is empowered to build the most engaging workflows, I will be working on putting together some blog posts about how to do some things that are relatively easy to with Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms but that can really help you build compelling business automation solutions. In this post I will cover a common question: "When I start a workflow or look at a workflow history, I see this really great picture of what is going on thanks to the Nintex workflow diagram. But, I have processes that I really don't want users to see inside of the workflow or I don't want them to see anything at all. How can I hide this infor