Hi Friends,
It has been an amazing August. I got to spend some time with the folks over in the Bellevue office and was fortunate to have enjoyed a bit of sunshine while I was there. Lots of things coming down the release pipe in the coming months. However I want to focus on the now; the 2 releases we did for August culminated in an epic feature roll out. I believe this is one of our biggest release months we have done in the history of Nintex Workflow Cloud.
- Collapse and expand actions - manage navigating large workflow designs by collapsing and expanding branching and containerized workflow actions. In addition, the collapse and expand state of an action is retained on save and publish. Something to think about - you might want to keep sections collapsed / or placed in "Action sets" to help make the workflow more readable / understandable when a user opens it, rather than being show the entire workflow design at first open.
- Introduction of the Action set - There’s also support for notes, to assist with adding descriptive context to the workflow actions grouped. Use Action sets to organize and group your workflow actions. You can read more about it here
- Addition of the Azure Active Directory Connector: You now have the ability to look up user details, query users and get a user's manager. As mentioned by Rick De Marco in his blog post, "The Get manager action becomes extremely powerful when building workflows that involve some kind of task approval."
- Support for putting and getting file attachments in Salesforce. You can now push all process specific files back into any Salesforce object that supports attachments or retrieve them later from a different process. You can read more about it here
- Support for exporting a draft workflow - you can now design the basic frame of the workflow and share that instead of a fully configured workflow
- In the workflow designer, we've improved the variables modal to support inline selection of default values and output checkbox. This has made the configuration experience easier and faster when designing external start workflows. Note, the output checkbox are only available when designing an external start workflow
- For Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) Connectors - Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, ShareFile:
- Start event - file variables are now included with the start event - this will save you a step where you no longer need to set a file variable to reference the file which the workflow was triggered from
- New actions for each EFSS to "Store a file" and "Get a file" - allows you to freely place or get a file from one Connector to another.
- Ensure consistent access to a file and folder picker experience in all “path” configuration fields - no more typing folder or file paths - you can simply pick and choose - or even use a file variable.
Listed above are just some of the features and many improvements. See the release notes for all the details.
What are we actively working on? We're currently focused on
- Improvements to the Document Generation action - generate a document using multiple templates and inclusion of these templates based on conditions; support for multiple outputs based on the merge type defined
- Extending the Box Connector events and actions to support Box Enterprise Metadata
- Improvements to the form experience when designing workflows for Public web form and Nintex Mobile
- Improvements to the instance details page - focused on aligning the activities in the instance activities table and ensuring each start item has the corresponding finished item.
- Efficiency around creating and selecting Connections when configuring events and actions. e.g. if there's only one Connection for the Connector, it will be defaulted to it.
If you'd like to reach out and talk about new ideas, improvements or challenges you've had using the Nintex Workflow Cloud platform, please drop me a message or reach out through the comments.
