News and Guidelines

I got super lazy today, and recorded a video rather than do the screen shot and typing thing... Enjoy and happy holidays..

There are a number of ways to have a Nintex Workflow start in a SharePoint 2010 or 2013 environment. Manual StartIn the Workflow Settings, you can also check the box for "Start Manually".  This gives users the ability to click on an item, select Workflows, and select the workflow they want to start.  This gives them a nice graphical view of the workflow they are going to start. In case you need it, it will also give them a form to fill in, if that workflow has some Start Form variables. This behavior is the same for both List/Library workflows and Site workflows. Event Driven List/Library WorkflowThe most common way to have your workflow start, is to set it to be event driven.The two events that are supported, are On Created and

For those of you in the 2016 world, or getting ready the migration.. The Hawkeye team released the 2016 data collector last night .. This joins the existing 2013 connector and will in the future join O365 also. For those of you who are trying to figure what I'm actually talking about.. Nintex Hawkeye is better explained here What's New From Nintex - Nintex Hawkeye!‌ with further in depth detail here Getting Started with a Nintex Hawkeye Process Intelligence Lens‌..  If you are using Hawkeye or currently evaluating it, be sure to upgrade your existing 2013 data collector as well. As there have been some enhancements and fixes release as well.The Release notes can be found here

Hi all, today I've discovered a very interesting setting in Global Settings section in Nintex Workflow Central Administration and I want to share it with you . The setting is called Task form properties view and "Workflow Task View" is the default value, that you change if you want.. This is the name of the view that specify which properties are shown in a default task form, if you don't have a view named like that, then all the properties will be shown (it's the most common scenario I've seen). If you create or edit such view, you can choose what you want to show or hide in task, so that user doesn't see all the "hidden" fields you can have in your list/library that are useful for the workflow but not for him/her.. Unfortunately this settings is global for all the farm a

Problem:Think about a situation where authorised user can view, add and delete the attachments and unauthorised user can only view the attachments inside a form. They will not have any rights to Add or delete any attachments from the listing. You can think that it could be easily handled by NINTEX rules. Yes, off course but there is a problem. The unauthorised user can download and view the attachments in IE but they can’t download or view from Chrome and Firefox. And yes I found it’s true when I was doing my last project. So how to download and make viewable to all the attachments to all unauthorised users from Chrome and Firefox browser restricting them to add and delete any more. Let’s see… You can think the File attachment control has two sections inside in it(for sake of understanding right now). One is the name of the file where it gets displayed after uploading and the second one is comprised of two buttons i.e.  ‘Delete’ and ‘Add’.

Workflow Designer Print   Zoom to view   Reporting and Management User-based workflow tracking   Summary statistics, reports, and charts  

Recently we had the problem that workflows stuck on iterating state machines, pause for...-actions, etc. The WFE's owstimer.exe ran continously on 25% by occupying about 330 MB and the workflow timerjobs were displayed stuck on 0% on running jobs page in central administration.By doing the steps in the blogpost https://community.nintex.com/community/build-your-own/blog/2015/08/26/tracking-and-resolving-stuck-workflow-timer-jobs#c…  by Andrew Beals I could find the responsible workflow which was a running instance containing a state machine that had two identical named states as you can see here:  I have no idea how the workflow designer did that, maybe by renamin

Hi Nintex Community,This summer I was able to go to Anacortes near the Orcas Island in Washington State and climb Mount Eerie. It is the tallest point on Fidalgo Island at a towering 1,273 feet. But instead, I spent most of my time wading into the Nintex Forms/Workflow 2013 SDK and Nintex Forms/Workflow 0365 API to work on some walkthroughs that will provide step-by-step instructions on export and publishing workflows and forms, designing your own custom workflow actions, and creating custom form controls.Over the next month, I will post the results of this effort. This will include the following walkthroughs: Use of the Nintex Workflow and Forms 0365  API to export and

FORMATTING AN HTML EMAIL WITH LIST ITEMS USING NINTEX “CALL WEB SERVICE” There are a few to many different ways to accomplish this, and I assume as long as you know how to use a Web Service, you can somewhat figure out how to do the same thing as what I’m about to show you even if you don’t own Nintex. I’ve always wanted to be able to do this and had some requirements given to me that required it. It took a lot of research and I combined a few different ways noted by other bloggers. I also had to research and find some specifics for myself. Hopefully this will help someone out.CALL WEB SERVICESo, what you are going to want to do is…Create a site workflow in Nintex. Add a “Call web service” action In the URL add, “Web URL/_vti_bin/Lists.asmx” For the UN and PW – Use an account that has administrative rights and a non-expiring pw/account Click “Refresh”

As a current Nintex Account Manager for the East Coast, I receive a lot of customer questions, because I am the first line of defense for a lot of their concerns. Our Support team handles the majority of the issues, but for the rare few that are not support related, I do my best to leverage the resources I have around me to answer their questions. This blog post below is in regards to the functionality of our current Forms product, and it's differences to InfoPath, as asked by a customer in the insurance industry. Nintex does not seem to support multiple views to view the same fields in different arrangements. To implement it in Nintex, we need to create hidden sections using panel controls or tabs. I am not sure if that type of implementation method can create long delays when loading forms with large number of controls and rules into a single view. Not necessarily, it depends on the number of contr

I was asked a lot in the past, since in Sharepoint by default supports creation of workflows to support business process automation, why is there a need to consider Nintex Workflow? In this write up, I am trying to revisit the approaches and steps involved in Sharepoint workflows. With the summary on that, I am hoping to identify key challenges one might face, or benefits one could get if Nintex is in place for the same purpose. Let's revisit the approaches in implementing workflow in default Sharepoint environment. To simplify, I grouped the approaches into three as summarized in the table below:  Approach Description Tool Out-of-the-box (OOB)Workflows Automate common business tasks such as getting approval or collecting feedbac

Many users use the Lazy Approval Settings when they are designing a workflow.Many of us don't know that when a user that receives an email that can be answered by replying it, and this user has set as Out of office, a loop of infinite emails begins. To solve this issue is simple. Just go to Sharepoint Central Administration, navigate to the Nintex Workflow Management / Lazy Approval Settings and add a phrase to ignore. Ignore the phrase "Out of office" 

Checking on the complexity of migrating workflows from Nintex 2013 to 2016 using Sharegate. Is there anything we need to consider in terms of the migration with Sharegate?Nintex FAQ regarding Nintex migrations with Sharegate How to Migrate and Manage Nintex Workflow and Forms for SharePoint and Office 365 Using Sharegate How to Manage Nintex Workflows Using SharegateCan yo

As you may all know, Nintex is closing the gap between features between O365 and On-premise versions of our products. Just a few important features are still missing. One of them (and maybe one of the most important one), is the Edit Task form feature for O365.  Guess what? That's exactly why I'm writing this blog!Our july release is shipping this feature to O365!I was really excited to test it, though I was having some worries about performances, but I have to admit that our development team has made a really well integrated feature that runs FAST! Let me give you a tour of this new feature! First of all, where will you find the feature? You will find this feature within the "Assign a task" action or "Start a task process" action.Open

I started creating my workflows in a very linear fashion across or down, each action laid out on my canvas.I quickly discovered the ability to "label" my action panels (do it!)But as my workflow started to grow in size scrolling up and down and side-to-side was increasingly frustrating. The only way I could get a clear view of the entire workflow was to zoom out which then made my label very hard to read. Testing my workflow also became very time-consuming as I would have restart and run through 10 steps to get to the action I thought was causing the problem, you get the idea.  One day I discovered Nintex in a Minute, Nancy & Shelley, Forms Film Festival, Jeopardy and Secret Agent Ninja in the

In the video below, I will walk you through how to build an employee onboarding workflow from start to finish using Nintex Workflow for Office 365. Some of the actions you will see me configure (such as Office 365 Create User, Office 365 Assign License, etc.) are part of the Enterprise Provisioning Pack. Enterprise Provisioning Pack Details Automate the entire process of provisioning, managing and de-commissioning of user accounts, transforming complex onboarding/off-boarding processes into one simple solution. Unify the management of users, mailboxes, custom user-groups, and even access to external systems. Now you can create and manage accounts across Office 365 and Yammer, spin-up or spin-down virtual machines in Amazon and Rackspace, ensuring efficient use of your chosen cloud infrastructure provider. Enterprise Provisioning Pack is available in Nintex Workflow fo

 In my dealing with customers, there are some questions and confusions that keep coming up. I thought I'd share them to help others who may have the same query's. Why is Nintex Different?Fully Leverage SPNintex Workflow is built natively on SharePoint using pre-existing SharePoint infrastructure and the Windows Workflow Foundation. The benefit is that you leverage your existing architecture and infrastructure and avoid incurring the costs of implementing, serving, and supporting additional platforms. Install in minutesNintex Workflow installs in minutes. No need to install clunky or outdated add-ons to client machines as required by some other workflow solutions. Design and deploy quicklyWorkflows are designed with no down time. When you create and publish your workflow, Nintex simply picks up the new design when the

I have always wanted Nintex Forms and Workflow for many years now. It's been about 3 months since I was able to purchase the Enterprise Edition and it has changed how I support my customers. Like anything else, learning new apps can be exciting and frustrating. As long as I can remember I said to myself "this would be a good lesson to share..." but I'm always just focusing on my work and always forget to follow through. This time I'll give it my best shot because 'm loving working with Nintex. I want to share with other new users things I find along the way that will help either get over that obstacle they face or bring to light a different approach. I'll be adding items as I progress through my Nintex journey. Nintex WorkflowAction Sets​ Nintex Forms

In this Article, you will learnHow to set a Calculated Value when the form is loaded How to develop JavaScript to get SharePoint Context Properties and Methods How to wait the loading of a JavaScript Library How you can hide Buttons or Controls based on user permissions In a Nintex Form in O365, even the user has only Read permissions, the Edit Item button is visible.If the user clicks Edit Item, then the Save button is visibleAnd if the user clicks Save, then (s)he receives this message

Hi All,This is my first blog and I hope it will help the beginners who are working on repeating control Scenario:List A and List B are two Lists with columns ColumnA,ColumnB in repeating control and depending upon some condition you want to create/modify the item in ListBExample:List Asia has  columns  "Country" and "City" in the repeating section hence we can add multiple rows for the values "Country" and "City" .List "Asia" also has "Count" column which is not present in the repeating section Suppose we want to update the  item of list named "Events" which will also have "Country" and "City"  in the repeating section with the values of "Country" and "City" in the repeating section of list Asia. List "Events" will also have "Count" column which will be updated with the value of "Count" of the item in List "Asia"Issue:Repeating control columns appea

This is one big day for Nintex This is a huge deal, if I can say so myself; and as a long time user of Nintex, seeing the evolution that has occurred from Nintex 2007 to the fourth generation of the Workflow product is breathtaking because it truly makes designing workflows so easy. On May 4, 2016, Microsoft rallied its ecosystem and, for the first time in a very long time, showered tons of love and marketing into an event centered on SharePoint® Server. Their well-executed goal was to bring assurance that SharePoint Server was still part of the strategy for Microsoft. If, like me, you were in attendance, you probably walked away with, “okay, time to figure out my SharePoint Server game plan and how much I want to leverage with SharePoint on-premises vs. using SharePoint online with Office 365.” The ov

Bingham Blalock​ posted a very useful blog about Some Common Misperceptions - Q & A In this post he touched upon a principle around the design (or architecture, if you want to try and convince your boss that your should earn an extra 5k a year) or workflows when it comes to changing a workflow whilst it's running. This prompted me to write about the idea of "micro-workflows" (I made that up, lets see if it sticks). Micro-workflows (as defined by me ) are workflows that perform specific tasks within a process. An example of this was an app I developed with an approval process which required a number of conditions to be queried before deciding which route the approval would take. There were a number of other ta

Alternative for "Copy to SharePoint" in Site workflows  If you have a requirement where you need the "Copy to SharePoint" action on a Site Workflow, you could do the followingCreate a new list named "Schedule Movement" with a column named "Year" and a column named "Month" Then write you workflow (staring on new items) using the "Copy to Sharepoint" Action. Then Schedule a Site Workflow adding a new item on the list "Schedule Movement"

Products: Nintex Forms 2010, Nintex Forms 2013 A question came in about activating Nintex Forms 2010/2013 via PowerShell. It is fairly easy to do assuming you have the FeatureDefinitionID (0cdf436f-61b0-43d2-b250-4360f0353b63). Below you will find an example for how to activate/deactivate the feature via PowerShell. PowerShell Script Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue   Enable-SPFeature -Url http://contoso.com -Identity 0cdf436f-61b0-43d2

The new user experience for document libraries in O365 is now being pushed out and my tenant recently picked up the change. I love all of the new UI and experience it brings. It has a lot of advantages, but also has further changes to be made. I'm not going to outline every single change here in this post as there are a lot of blogs on the subject already. It is not clear if these changes will make their way to SP 2016, but it should be no surprise when they do. https://blogs.office.com/2016/06/07/modern-document-libraries-in-sharepoint/Office Dev Center - Update on Modern Document Libraries and Extensibility