Introduction
This article is part one in a three-part series of Nintex for SharePoint upgrade-related articles that show you how to extract workflows from your on-premises environment, import them into Nintex Automation Cloud, and upgrade them to ensure they work in their new home. For more information on importing a package file and upgrading a workflow, you can review parts 2 and 3.
A few assumptions
For this article, I'm assuming you are familiar with the Nintex for SharePoint On-Premises upgrade guide, which provides more detail on the steps you need to take before getting started with the upgrade process. These steps include migrating your SharePoint On-Premises data to SharePoint Online. By that data, I mean your site collections, subsites, lists, and libraries, along with the items currently in them. It also explains how to set up your Nintex Automation Cloud tenant with the Upgrade Center, which you need to do before importing a package file with your extracted workflows. If you have all that under your belt, then great news: we can move on!
The upgrade path
The path to upgrading your Nintex for SharePoint workflows to Nintex Automation Cloud begins with understanding how to inventory and extract workflows from your on-premises environment. Then, import the extracted workflows into the Nintex Automation Cloud Upgrade Center. We want to help you with this by providing you with a PowerShell script that can either generate a report file that lists details of all your workflows or physically bundle them up in a package file that can be imported into your Nintex Automation Cloud environment. Still with me? Awesome! Let's move on and unpack this topic about workflow packages.
Must haves
Now, for the workflow extraction script to run on your server, there are some must-haves:
- You must have administrative access to the server that hosts SharePoint Central Administration.
- That server must be running PowerShell Version 5 at a minimum.
- The administrator account you use to run the script must have SPShellAdmin privileges.
- You must read through the upgrade guide in the links section below.
- You must download the Nintex Upgrade Center workflow extraction script to the server that hosts SharePoint Central Administration, where you will run it.
Taking inventory
Over the years, your Nintex for SharePoint environment has likely accumulated many workflows tied to your SharePoint lists and libraries. If you're tasked with the effort to upgrade those workflows to Nintex Automation Cloud, you're going to be interested in knowing which workflows are dormant little entities just sitting there doing nothing productive vs those wonderfully busy workflows waiting to move to their brand new home so they can do bigger and better things. This might be a great time to take inventory of your entire environment to be strategic in which workflows should be upgraded vs left behind. When the script runs in report mode, it will generate a comma-separated value (CSV) file that can be used to create reporting views in Microsoft Excel or another reporting tool of your choosing. We're not too picky here.
The output file will contain information about workflows, user-defined actions, and schedules for any scheduled workflows. This will be a big help for you in painting the bigger picture of what's out there in your environment. To weed out those pesky dormant workflows I mentioned earlier, consider using the MostRecentStartTime column to help you determine the last time a workflow ran. You may even find that you still require a workflow behind some of those dormant processes, and the workflow design just needs to be retooled.
Packaging it all up
When you're ready to physically package up your workflow definitions, the script can be run in package mode to generate an archive package in zip file format. This file will contain your physical workflow definitions based on whether you select to extract them from the entire SharePoint farm, a site collection, a specific subsite, or even a specific list or library.
Once generated, you can copy the file to another location or immediately import it directly into the Upgrade Center of your Nintex Automation Cloud environment. Watch the following video to learn more about the workflow extraction script.
Package File Limit
Note: There is a limit of 500 workflows per package file. If you need to extract more than that from your environment, consider lessening the scope of each package file you generate. Instead of looking at the whole farm at once, you can scope down to the site, subsite, or list level.
