July Mission - What's your favorite workflow action and why?

[#1]

We all have something we use more often than others, and this month it's all about Nintex Workflow action love.

What Nintex Workflow action is your favorite and why?

Is it an action you use most frequently, does it have a coolness factor; perhaps it's an action that let's you do something you didn't think previously possible, or saves you a lot of time?

Share it!

Share with the community the action or two you love, tell us why and earn yourself a bonus 300 points! Participate by posting a comment below this post.​ Feel free to include any screenshots or examples that'll help explain your favourite things!

[eiben]

One of my favorites is the "call webservice action". There is almost no limit in what you can do with this action. The most obvious is to call webservices (doh!), but by calling SharePoint webservice you can achieve almost anything! You can modify settings, create SharePoint groups, retrieve attachments from list items - all without the need to write a custom action.

You can also access the managed meta data store and other services via webservices; I think this is really awesome and offers unknown possibilities.

[#3]

Nice choice Henning!

[jackgelo]

Oh, I think that I have a lot of favorite actions..probably the most loved is the state machine because quite all workflow my customers ask for require a lot of step back or step forward depending on approval task so I have to use it very often..

I like it very much also because it's very very simple to use and it offers something that cannot be done with SharePoint Designer 2010 workflows

[eiben]

A great enhancement to the state machine, if the current state would be available in the workflow context. 

Currently I always assign the current state to a variable to write this to a column of the current item. 

Context data would ease this. 

[#6]

Oh there are so many but I my favorite is the 'Request approval' action. Maybe it is because I have been using this for a while now but I think its amazing how you can assign an approval for a number of people like I have done below:-

It is also pretty cool how the approvers get to comment on why they approved or declined the approval sent to them by email!

Its a great way of communicating and getting things done in a really busy organization where people are in and out if the office.

[fhunth]

My favorite action is "Flexi Task" because it has a lot of features that make open mouthed users, as:

• Outcome behaviours
• Delegations
• Reminders
• Individual settings for approvers
• Lazy approval
• etc

[xMikeX]

A lot of cool actions that I would have written about have already received their due respect, so I'll choose the Action Set.   The Action Set is a very powerful action in that it is great for grouping other actions together.   One really neat feature is the ability to configure the action to Run as Workflow owner.  This is a really powerful feature when you utilize it with the Set item permissions action.  Lastly, we can't talk about Action Set without mentioning the ability to create Snippets from them.

-Mike

[c_meyer]

My favorite action is the "Regular expression" action. This actions allows you ervery kind of manipulation of Strings, you can extract, split and a lot of more things! Also i love every other action!

I Nintex.

Keep Nintexing!

[mlauer]

I agree with Mike M Mike and Giacomo Gelosi , so I have two favorites. State machine for workflow flow control and action sets for grouping and running actions in an other user context.

Manfred

[deanvirag]

The one group that tops my list are the Social Actions - post to Yammer, Wordpress, etc. We created a monthly reporting form/workflow solution where supervisors have the option of elevating notable staff submissions up to executive level visibility. Executives can share a post with the whole company via Yammer with a simple tick of a checkbox. Completely automated - LOVE IT!

[praios81]

I like the state machine action because it's useful for recurring workflow areas or modeling purposes.

[rbachmann]

Anymore "Request Data"-fans here? Definitely my most used Action. So powerful in combination with Nintex Forms.

[josh]

My favorite action is hands down the State Machine. The added ability to move to different parts of the process at any time, all in the context of a single workflow, is super convenient and valuable.

My runner-ups are the Call Web Service, Flexi task, and UDAs (although that one might be cheating ).

My users would definitely vote for the Flexi task.

[mark_viglione]

I'd have to say the Action Set for me right now is my favorite.  Being able to group actions for reuse at multiple places in the workflow is such a huge time saver.

Also I'll give a quick shout out to the Switch, who I took for granted until trying to build something in O365 before it was available, that was a huge mess to handle with out it.

[itrippedover]

I'm going to keep my favourite pretty simple...its the looping/run if/for each family...SPD workflows don't have this functionality OOTB and I use it all the time...the other day I had to use SPD to simply send an email to a contacts list (stored in a SP contacts list), pretty straight forward with nintex but in SPD? Not easy!

[cju]

I completely agree with you ! My favorite action is the "web request" action. With this action, you can call SharePoint 2013 REST API requests, your own web services, ones from other systems and here is the magic : you can interact with other applications without coding ! Definitely awesome !

[kapilkjoshi]

This is really tough, just to select ONE. If i have to really select the best, then i would say For-Each loop. As Suzanne Hunt mentioned, we lacked this functionality in OOB SP workflows. Coming from there, this was gold.

My next favorites would be State machine and Query XML.

[claireprosser]

I think the Social actions are great - being able to post items to twitter or yammer

[cgb]

My favorite is the Switch workflow action - I have several programs that use this logic.  My second favorite is the Action set workflow action for grouping several tasks into one unit of work.

[shareptkarm]

One of my favorites is the "call webservice action". This was one of the actions that impressed me so much the first time I saw Nintex Workflow. This was when I was an older developer, and I was so Impressed with this functinality that afterwards I was a Nintex fanboy for life!

[Chris_Ben]

Reading down this list I keep on seeing the suggestions and nodding in agreement.  It's really hard to choose just one because the actions that we implement depend on the requirements!

If I had to choose just one then I'd pick the FlexiTask (on-prem) / Assign a task (o365) action as it does so much for just one little box and approvals are at the heart of many workflows.   Think about all this power:

* LazyApproval

* Being able to evaluate a set of replies

* Being able to provide and configure a set of outcomes

* Reminders

* Escalations

* Delegations

That's a lot from just one action!  Then if you wanted to design the classic multi-step approval process, just copy your one task and paste it below the "approved" branch.  How awesome is that?

[andrewg]

My two favorite are Flexi Task and State Machine. There are so many options to the flexi task to configure each notification it sends, name and number of outcomes, the outcome behavior, reminders, lazy approval, escalation,.... So much functionality in one single task.

I begin using the State machine as the heart of a lot of workflows. Its a great way to organize separate processes within the workflow and allow you to repeat steps when necessary.

[christopheraucq]

I really wonder why nobody mentionned Log to History List

Do you think you can really develop without this one 😉

I am sure that eveybody has already used it once 😉

My favorite Nintex Work(flow) action is 'Open this site everyday'.

[pesikwane]

Hey everyone, I completely agree with most, if not all of the actions that people have mentioned. Myself and a lot of my clients love the Flexi Task especially when its coupled with lazy approval, and User Task Delegation (between two dates) can really be some powerful stuff. Furthermore, the Flexi Task Action is easy to configure, you can attach a custom Nintex form to it, plus it also allow us to set User Permissions while and after the task on the item is completed, as a way of allowing us to add security on the item.

[#26]

I guess my favorites are others favorites too:

- Flexi task

- action set

- run as workflow owner

Quiet a much has already been talked and mentioned about them in above posts 🙂

[andrewg]

You are absolutely right Christophe. It is probably the most used. Usually the most practical tool in the box isn't the shiniest and taken for granted.

Nice followup "action"

[#28]

State Machine is my favorite, closely followed by FlexiTask

[Gavin-Adams]

My favourite is Commit Pending Changes

'cause that just makes stuff work!

Commit early and commit often

Designing your Workflow - Commit Pending Changes Action NW2010 & NW2013

[amywilliford]

I would have to agree with the majority. My faves are State Machine, Call Webservice, and FlexiTask. Although, pauses, commits and logging help keep me sane.

[#31]

I'm not a very experienced user and have been using Nintex for last few months only and I'm yet to use the complex actions like "Call Web service". I mostly work with Nintex forms and use the inline functions frequently to create my own rules for form validation (which is great fun).

However, within these few months I've been using the following three actions in the WF quite frequently so for now they are my favorite actions

1. Action set (Allows reusing of tasks)

2. Calculate Date (I configure a lot of reminders in my WF, phew!!!)

3. Build String in combination with Create Item and Copy/Move to SharePoint action

Scanning thru the comments section gives me the impression that may be in future "Call Web service" will be one of favorites!!!

[eharris04]

By far and for simplicity of design, I really like the "Action Set".  The fact that you can store a bunch of other actions within it, reuse it multiple times and wshrinking the design canvas is absolutely genius.  There are other great actions out there as well, but I could only mention one as a favorite and well this one took the gold trophy :-).

[patrick_hosch]

Personally, i love the RegEx action. I use it on so many occassions to evaluate or manipulate data. Closely followed by the action set for the reasons mentioned by Eric

[c_meyer]

RegEx action

[bamaeric]

Others have already said it, but my favorite action is the Flexi Task.  This action has so much flexibility and so many features wrapped into it:

• LazyApproval
• Outcomes
• Behaviours
• Task Notifications
• Custom Reminders and Escalations

Plus adding Nintex Forms into the mix allows for customizing the task form to create some incredibly powerful and user centric forms.

[#36]

I have quite a few favourtie actions:

Flexi task

Run If

Switch

Request Data

[greenawayr]

Call Web Service is obviously the most powerful, but in terms of being pleasantly surprised, I loved finding out that Copy to SharePoint would extract an attachment from a List Item and copy it to a SharePoint document library, complete with meatdata.

[#38]

I echo everyone's favorites, as there are just so many powerful actions with Nintex!  However, I'd def say my 2 favorites are State Machine and Flexi Task.  These 2 give me most everything I need.  Now, just waiting for Nintex O365 to catch-up with its feature set!!!!  =;-)

[burkslm]

I love Flexi-Tasks. There are so many things you can do with it in one action and as it says....its flexible!!!!

[#40]

This is fantastic guys! I'm putting together a post on what actions you all love to use 300 points coming your way too.

[glenda]

Action Sets!

[rhia]

I know this was asked in 2015.. so I am VERY much cheating.. but..

My favourite action is SET MULTIPLE VARIABLES !