Follow Us:
https://www.c5insight.com/Contact/tabid/95/Default.aspxWe’re a little into 2016, and lately I’ve been working a lot with Nintex as a partner. If you’ve taken a look at their site lately, they have a lot going on! I thought I’d try and highlight a few areas that I believe will be important.
Why are we talking about Nintex in the first place? I won’t take time in this post to do any technical comparisons between Nintex and other platforms on the market, but I will outline a couple noteworthy things that stand out. First of all, you can’t get 5 feet without seeing the following:
“Workflow for everyone. Everywhere. Anytime”
That’s clear and implemented by the core 4 products they offer:
Nintex now fully supports Office 365 and on-premise, and their other newer offerings, like Nintex Live in particular, really help fill the gap if you want to have content available outside your firewall without opening it up. They have a clear and concise focus on the problem, and their vision to fix that problem.
First announced back in December, this conference is different than the others SharePoint or Microsoft you’ve been to. It’s ALL and ONLY Nintex, all the time! That’s right, you don’t hear too many other companies like Nintex throwing their own conference! Over 3 days in February (Feb 22nd – 24th) in Las Vegas, there will be 40 sessions to get your Nintex geek-on. If you’re having any trouble convincing your boss to let you go, or on the fence yourself if it’s worth it, you can read their Top 10 Reasons to Attend Nintex InspireX blog, or just forward over their pre-made manager InspireX justification letter. Take a look at the agenda for the 3 days on the InspireX Agenda page to see all the different topics and sessions that will be delivered.
Our very own Curtis Hughes will be in attendance, so be sure to look him and connect while you’re there!
If you’re a user of Salesforce.com, you’re probably very aware that it is not meant to be a document management system (or any other CRM system for that matter). In recent years a company named Drawloop made a big impact in the world of CRM with their Salesforce App on the AppExchange. From their website:
“Proposals. Contracts. Licensing agreements. Renewals. Account plans. Creating documents doesn’t have to be a time-consuming headache. Document generation automates the process of document creation. It recognizes that there’s nothing more frustrating than having to manually recreate the same set of documents with data that already sits in Salesforce. Replace this tedious, manual, cut-and-paste task with a fully automated document generation solution.”
In July of 2015, Nintex announced their acquisition of Drawloop, and it was introduced into the workflow family. Remember mail-merging? At a fundamental level that’s what we’re doing here. You build these dynamic document packages that contain the document or set of document templates, and what kinds of records they should be available for allowing for Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF files to be generated with data from Salesforce.com.
After the merger, Drawloop has now been rebranded into Nintex Document Generation.
If you’ve gone through any of the training on their Learning Portal, one of the first short videos is CEO John Burton outlining 4 things to know about Nintex:
So far Nintex has been tight-lipped on any of their plans for changes or new features for Nintex workflow and SharePoint 2016. It’s important to notice the 3rd tenant there. They want to ensure that no matter what the platform that Nintex products allow the customer to use the right product at the right time as well as increased functionality at the same time Microsoft releases new platform versions. So I think it’s safe to say that they have been working with Microsoft closely, and will be ready for the next platform release.
If you notice on the agenda for InspireX, there are a couple sessions devoted to the topics which gives you another good reason to attend!
Now this is really exciting and all indications show this could be a game-changer. Basically these are add-on extensions for Nintex workflows that allow you to connect and do things in either Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.com. What’s even better, is that you can have actions in the CRM trigger the workflow! Typically this is done from the SharePoint side to CRM. In their Quick Start Guide for Office 365 example, they have a contacts list in SharePoint, and when you create a contact in that list, it goes out to CRM and does some stuff. That’s cool. Here are the kinds of things you can do with actions:
To get the creative juices flowing, you can check out the Nintex what you can do page for more ideas. But like I said, where this gets really awesome is to be able to run a Nintex workflow that’s triggered from CRM. If you wanted to integrate this way with SharePoint, normally you would need to have javascript resources that fire a plugin that triggers a web service that goes to SharePoint and do stuff. Not anymore! I will say that this type of workflow will take a little more technical acumen. For example, the one sample from Nintex shows starting a workflow from CRM and do other stuff in CRM. Essentially, what’s happening here is that you use a custom ribbon button in CRM going to a custom workflow form start page with query parameters in the URL. This page then in turn starts the workflow which reads values from the form as inputs into the workflow and goes on.
Outside of SharePoint 2016, Nintex is continually providing updates to the core Workflow platform and for Office 365. You can keep up with these major new features on the What’s New for Nintex Workflows page. Here are the current highlights:
You can also stay up to date on news and information from the Nintex blog or keep up with the latest demos at the Events and Webinars page. Be sure to check out the app if you have Office 365, they offer a free trial. Feel free to reach out and contact us if you have any questions on Nintex products or SharePoint workflows!
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
Request Download
This 60-second assessment is designed to evaluate your organization's collaboration readiness.
Learn how you rank compared to organizations typically in years 1 to 5 of implementation - and which areas to focus on to improve.
This is a sandbox solution which can be activated per site collection to allow you to easily collect feedback from users into a custom Feedback list.
Whether you are upgrading to SharePoint Online, 2010, 2013 or the latest 2016, this checklist contains everything you need to know for a successful transition.