Out of Office Task Delegation - Nintex Automation Cloud

This is now installable from the gallery at: Nintex Gallery - Out of Office Task Delegation

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Hi,

Some time back we launched Task Delegation for NAC so that a task assignee, or somebody given the Business Owner role for a given Workflow could change who tasks are allocated to without updating the workflow design. 

A natural progression from this is to allow users to set themselves as out of office, or have an administrator do it for them, which will delegate all tasks present and future to another user.

While we don’t have that feature out of the box yet it’s easy enough to build!

There are many ways to skin this particular cat, but let me share one approach.

Problem

We want to enable users to set themselves out of office for a particular time duration.

Approach

We can use a Workflow with a Start Form to populate a Nintex Table with the following structure:

Form:

The workflow uses the new Nintex Tables Create a Row action to populate a table like this:

We can then use a scheduled workflow that runs everyday to delegate tasks.

This approach uses the Nintex APIs, and requires an Application Token to get an Auth Token to make the API calls.  

This workflow operates like this:

1. Schedule Start - everyday 0800
2. Get an Auth token for the Nintex API 
3. Loop 12 times
   1. Query the table for any records where today is between the from and to dates
   2. Loop over these user records
      1. Get current users tasks via Web Service action [Reference 2]
         1. Loop over current users tasks
            1. Get taskAssignments
               1. Loop over current task taskAssignments
               2. Check if taskAssignment has aready been delegated
                  1. No
                     1. Delegate task
   3. Clean-up table entries where today is after the To date

An example of this should be posted to the Nintex Gallery in the coming days and this article will be updated.

Possible Extensions

Once we see how easy this is, we can imagine a few options to make it even better:

• Integrate to a leave request application so the user doesn’t have to fill in the OOF manually.
• Integrate with Employee Offboarding to delegate any tasks with a user who’s leaving the organisation.
• Allow a select group of admin users/business owners to delegate other people’s tasks
• Integrate with MS Graph APIs to enable Outlook Out of Office automatically for the same time period.
• Allow free/busy access to users Outlook calendars and delegate NAC tasks when the user’s calendar is set as out of office.

Hope fun with it!

References

1. Get Auth Token: Applications | Nintex Automation Cloud
2. List Tasks: List tasks | Nintex Automation Cloud
3. Delegate Task: Delegate a task assignment | Nintex Automation Cloud

4. Gallery Implementation: Nintex Gallery - Out of Office Task Delegation