Nintex Workflow for Office 365 (cloud)

A - OBJECTIVE: to highlight new features at Nintex Workflow for Office 365 (cloud version).

B - REASON:

In comparison with the on-premises version, Nintex Workflow for Office 365 (cloud version) will be reviewed for its new technical actions that can be used in your development.

C - SOLUTIONING:

1. Cross-tenant Operations:

• In multi-tenancy scenario, an action in this tenant (e.g. list item update) can trigger another action at a different tenant.
• This feature is useful when it comes to performing a cross-tenant data aggregation or system/application integration.
• In the example, the action Office 365 update items illustrates the case when an item at other Office365 tenant is to be updated.

2. Document (or Form) Generator: 

• In process improvement, paper forms are converted to electronic forms, but it is mostly saved in the form of list item, not an actual e-form. However, usually for legal purposes, the process owner has a need to store the softcopy of the e-form following a specific format and the static content will be changed from time to time (e.g. Term & Conditions can be updated year after year, not what the user keyed in). As a result, the data integrity will be the problem because of the changes in the static text.
• This action "Document Generation" is a good option to capture the whole format of the form (including user inputs & static words at the time the form is submitted).

• In the example, a developer can create a new template (stored at the doc library Shared Documents) associated to a specific MS Word format, and this format can be captured at the submission time. In addition, workflow variables can be used in the template to generate dynamic content. Any revision of the form in future will not affect the submitted form.

3. (External Internet-accessible) Database Connectivity service:

• This feature is similar to the Business Connectivity Services at SharePoint, which allows your application to consume any Internet-accessible database directly.

4. Integration with other service providers (e.g. Azure, Adobe Sign, DocuSign, etc).

• These features are available under the tab Integration and Provisioning at the Nintex actions.

5. Misc: other new actions should be taken into consideration to design your applications:

• New Wait Actions: the workflow will be paused until the preferred action is executed.

• User Interaction: the 2 actions Assign a task and Start a task process can be used together with Nintex Forms for Office 365.

        Important Note: by design, you cannot send the task to an external user.

• Translate Document: A workflow will pick a specific document under a selected library and translate it to the preferred language, then save it to another library

D - SOURCE CODE: 

Nil.