September Mission: "Five Minute Fix"

[#1]

September Mission: The Five Minute Fix

This month's mission was suggested in reply to last month's mission: World's Easiest Nintex Connect Mission.

There were a lot of good ideas posted, and I'll use a few of the more simple ones before delving into creating some of the more complex requests.

The ask is very simple:  Tell us what' the best Nintex solution you came up with in five minutes* that provided a solution at your company?

Reply below with the scenario you were asked to respond to quickly, what you did, and what Nintex products you used  Include an image if you can.

You'll get 100 points and the Five Minute Fix badge!

*I think it's safe to say that "five mintues" is just a catch-phrase meaning "in a hurry."

[fhunth]

Some years ago we started using Nintex on an important bank in Argentina, we began building some simple processes because the customer wanted to adopt it slowly. This bank has many branches on all the country and used to process customer requirement with traditional mails and waiting air mail with paper forms.

Suddenly a volcano erupted and flights were cancelled for near a week. Some managers knew that they have a new workflow tool ( Our dear Nintex Workflow 2007 ) were they could implement fastly a workflow. So they asked if it could be made for tomorrow, and we did it. The new process was implemented using a custom Infopath Form with  Nintex Workflow. Since then they don't need more papers for this form and implemented +50 workflows.

[greenawayr]

We had a customer who had a file share full of documents that needed to be reviewed annually for compliance. They had a spreadsheet that they checked every day to see which documents needed to be reviewed on that particular day. Then one person would go into the file share and find the document and email the reviewer the file asking for a review and approval. Obviously this was time consuming and unreliable as the person doing would get in a muddle trying to keep track of all the documents being reviewed and which ones they still hadn't had a response back on. The auditors deemed this unaaceptable so a quick resolution was required. This is SharePoint and Nintex bread and butter.

We threw together a library with a reviewer column and a review date. The user uploaded the documents and spent a couple of hours copying the review dates and reviewers from the spreadsheet into SharePoint, then we created a list workflow to handle the approval and update the review date and scheduled site workflow that ran daily, evaluating which docs needed reviewing and starting the approval workflow on each of them. So easy and ticked all the boxes needed as well as saving the customer lots of time.

[v_reschke]

I had a customer ask for an approval workflow that could start off where it left off. They had the task option to return for more information if needed. This also allowed for restarting the workflow if there was an error along the way.

I found state machine with a switch proved handy.

[robg]

For me it was an employee saying we need someway of letting people in the field to report health and safety issues in the field.

Used a basic form that captured the geo-location with attachments.

Published to Nintex Mobile and we can now see the location (on a map) of the issue and report with pictures of the hazard from the Mobile form.

[rickbakker]

A WeTransfer like service in SharePoint Server 2013.

The idea came up in 5 minutes. Creating it took just a bit longer

[jackgelo]

One of our customer asked me if there was a way to automate the creation of site collections for projects and other activities, so it could be a "self-process" instead of asking the IT to create the site collection..

Created a list with all the information they need to create a new site collection and some people fields in order to popoluate the default groups and then with Create Site Collection and Call Web Service we've done the magic!

[eiben]

One of our customers has a lot of documents that contain sensitive information, which is only to be shared by certain people. A document should only be accessible by the location-manager, the department-manager, the regional-manager, the business-unit-manager and the board of directors.

So I created a drop-off library where each document had two fields: location and department. Users are allowed to create new documents, but don't have view permission to the library.

Within a workflow I derive the the region as well as the business-unit. Next would be to create sharepoint-groups (if the not already exist) for the location, the region, the department and the business-unit (and the board). Finally I would create a new folder (if it doesn't already exist) with the combination of "location_region_department_bu" in another document library, assigned all the related groups permission and copy the document to this folder.

If a new group was create I would also send out an email notifying a manager to add the correct people to the newly created group.

The original document is retained for two weeks and the removed using the information rights policy of the drop-off library.

This way I could easily drop many documents in the drop-off library and have them assigned the right permissions using just a couple of folders & permission inheritance.

[kelliganp]

We have a fairly complicated leave request process for a large team we have supporrting a program overseas. Beacuse of the nature of the program and the loaction they are not on our corporate fringe package. We had to make our own system to manage leave. The leave process took some time but a quickie fix that came about as a result was a weekly leave report to gather data out of the leave forms, put the data into a .CSV file and save the file into a library on the site collection.

Most of the work is pretty standard stuff but the cool part happens in a web request action. After we built the body of our .CSV file with for each, collection operations and a build string action, we use the PUT method to get our gathered data (var_FileBody) into our file path (var_NewFileURL).

[rickbakker]

Yes, a very cool thing indeed. I used it for html files.

[kelliganp]

Yes, it came in handy. I had posted a full walkthrough of it here.

[jesse_mchargue]

Our "quick fix" scenario was for our Employee Recognition program and automating it. At first, the group would get notified that someone did a "good job" via email, walk-up conversation, or just passing by in the hallway. This lead to many people not really getting the recognition they deserved as the communications were not personal or timely.

The suggestion was made to make a simple form that accepted nominees, who was nominating, and what for. The workflow then parsed each nominee and gathered their information (email, supervisor, etc.) and then sent out an email with all the details to the employee as well as their supervisor. We then created a simple web part view of "recent" recognition so that everyone could see it.

While it did not solve any major problem, it did raise awareness of other employees good deeds, as well as Nintex products and what we are capable of. Since then, we have had a steady demand for Nintex workflows and forms, which, in the end, is what we want.

[jesse_mchargue]

Rob Gallagher‌ - 

I am itching to use geolocation in forms!

Almost half of our employees are field workers and I can only imagine how many uses we can think of for them!

[xMikeX]

Excellent idea nonetheless!

[Chris_Ben]

I have two quick fixes:

1. Workflow had been running for a while in the organisation but they were new to forms so many were using standard SharePoint forms.  One thing that bugged users was they had to always select or type their own name into a person field.  By creating the same form using Nintex and changing the default setting to "Current User" suddenly they didn't need to fill in that field any more and were much happier!

2. CRM is not the easiest product in the world to use.  It often has a bunch of fields that no-one bothers using.  This customer needed to capture some basic details about any new organisations.  One SharePoint list, one form and one Nintex action (Dynamics CRM create Organisation) later, people are happily adding new organisations via the Nintex mobile app on their phone.  OK it didn't take 5 minutes, it actually took just over an hour but most of that time was spent understanding the Dynamics CRM schema!

[robg]

Hi

Yes it is a very cool feature and very easy to implement:

Have a look at  

If there is anything I can help with just holla

[patrickabel]

Rob Gallagher‌ Jesse McHargue‌ It's good to see others using this one as well! My in a hurry solution involved security inspections at schools where unlocked doors, broken windows, etc. needed to be logged and reported. This UDA alongside a Nintex mobile app was my quick fix.

In this case, I was working with SharePoint Online (O365) so I had to make a number of changes to the internals of the above UDA but it followed the same design pattern.

[greenawayr]

I like this Rob, I'm certainly going to be making use of it in the future with a field sales team out and about.

[emha]

my quick win/fix was when I implemented gate pass through evidence using deep links and QR codes.

[xMikeX]

One quick five minute fix was when a client had a calculated field that counted the number of days since something had occurred.  Because SP only updates the values of a calculated field when an edit is made to an item, a quick workflow was whipped up to run on a daily schedule to cause an update to the item therefore causing the calculated field to regenerate its value.  You've got to love Nintex for the simplicity of being able to create such powerful solutions in record time.

[cassymfreeman]

I can't pick just one...  arghhh it's too hard.  I would say "quick" fixes for me are always scheduled site workflows.  The number of requests we get for people wanting to be reminded of due dates, or notified of expiry dates is very high.  I could do this in my sleep I have done it so often now.  Such a simple but powerful solution and they are always so happy with the outcome.

[tbeduneau]

A customer asked me about "I already have a contrat validation process , made with NINTEX. But my CEO wants me to uprade to something more official and robust...I can't manage how to deal with this".

Simply put 2 or 3 DocuSign workflow actions and the job was done  : legal electronic signature at the end of the process ! Not even five minutes....but a great value for customer. The best time to ROI in my NINTEX history.

[andrewg]

One "in-a-hurry" solution actually came during a demo. I was demoing Nintex forms and workflow to a potential customer and they handed to me a safety incident card. It was a 4x6 hard stock card that employees would fill out in the plants they work at if accidents or near misses occur. They have trouble getting these completed and if they are, they usually don't make it to HQ as it has to be mailed. So I created the form in Nintex Forms for O365 with a simple show/hide rule, and included required fields, but then published it to Nintex Mobile. So within 5-10 minutes of walking them through what I was doing, I had a fully functional mobile app for safety incidents. It was easy to walk them through possible workflows that can go on after submissions and also demo other goodies like submitting with pictures.

[janeyres]

A client wanted to use a workflow to move documents and preserve the version history, so we used the author.dll called from a Web request action and it worked brilliantly. Many thanks to ‌ for his helpful blog article on this.

[bamaeric]

I had a client that was struggling with user adoption for their SharePoint implementation. They decided to automate their paper/email based vacation request process and house it within their SharePoint HR site. I built a vacation request form with Nintex Forms and used Nintex Workflow to build an approval process solution. The result of the solution was a time saving approval process and better visibility on vacation request statuses. It also served as a springboard to the client as they developed several workflow and forms solutions after other departments saw what could be accomplished with Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms.

[mlauer]

Request was to show how many characters can still be typed in a Nintex Forms text box by giving a max allowed length (--> ).

[burkslm]

I created conditional formatting in a list. The customer wanted the color to change on cells based on the status. I used a Nintex workflow for the list that would initially set the status to the default. I used a site workflow that ran on a schedule. This workflow would calculate the amount of days its been since the item has been in review. Based on how many days, I would update the status. I used SharePoint Designer 2010 to look at the status and change the background color of the cell. When SharePoint Designer 2013 came out, I used JavaScript to change the color.

[burkslm]

Gotta watch out for those volcanos!!!

[deanvirag]

A few days late but here it is... Status reporting updates that can be accessed via website or via Nintex mobile. Amazing capability to create multiple layouts of the same form. Now even the more remote workers can stay connected and their their success stories with the team. 

[#30]

I've awarded the badges/points for this one today (Oct. 4th). You can see your badges via: Avatar>View Profile>Reputation>Missions.  So, if you don't see the Five Minute Fix badge, let me know.

Thanks for taking part!