I have a customer that wanted to use a Nintex form on his mobile device(s) to capture and annotate photos and then add them to a SharePoint list along with information about the photos such as location taken, notes, etc. The customer owns a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge phone and a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 running Windows 10. So, I created a Nintex form that accepts attachments and published it to the Desktop layout, the Nintex Mobile Phone layout, and the Nintex Mobile Tablet layout. I then downloaded and installed the Nintex Mobile App on a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge and a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablet to test. After a bit of configuring, I was able to access the mobile form from both devices. During testing I was disappointed to discover that the attachment functionality works differently on each device.
Nintex Mobile Phone Layout
The attachment functionality on the Nintex Mobile Phone app worked exactly as I was hoping. When the user clicked the add attachment icon on the form the following modal menu appeared.
That is what I was hoping for! Directly from the form, the user can access his phone's camera, take photos, and attach them directly to the form. The user can even annotate the photos by adding text and simple line drawings to the image. My customer was delighted when he discovered this functionality. The Nintex Mobile Phone app was a great success! The Nintex Mobile Tablet app, not so much. Here is what we discovered.
Nintex Mobile Tablet Layout
The Nintex Mobile Tablet layout looked very similar to the Mobile Phone Layout, so we were initially very excited. The customer liked the idea of being able to use his Surface to take pictures. However, disappointment set in when we clicked the add attachment icon on the form. We were presented with the traditional Windows "open" window.
This means that using his Surface Tablet, the user would have to take the photo using the Surface Camera, save the photo, edit the photo to add annotations, resave the photo and then manually attach the images to the form - a much longer and less appealing process.
Conclusion
The Nintex Mobile Phone layout is more feature rich when it comes to attachments. Users can use the phone camera to take and attach pictures or videos directly to the form, select from images in the gallery to attach, or attach document files such as Office documents or PDFs.
Note: As stated above, I tested the mobile tablet layout using a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablet with Windows 10. I did not test the Nintex Mobile App on an Apple or Android tablet. Perhaps the attachment functionality is more robust using on of those more "traditional" tablets.
