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Nintex Workflow Cloud Xtensions

Xtensions – Nintex Workflow Cloud is becoming expansible

It has already been announced couple of months ago, during the Nintex InspireX conference in New Orleans, in February this year, by Vadim Tabakam and Brad Orluk during their presentation “Extensibility on the Nintex Workflow Platform” and later on Nintex Blog.

The new, cool feature (that now is in beta preview), called “extensibility framework”. The tool that is allowing customers to add to the Nintex Workflow Cloud a custom REST API endpoints, that are “encapsulated” into ready-to-use actions. How does it work?

Nintex Pricing Revised

Nintex licensing models revised

Nintex subscription based pricing model is evolving since the beginning (since July 2016, when it was first announced). In January 2017 it has had it’s first major update. That time Nintex introduced such changes, as:

  1. No more workflow action limits (before it was 50 per workflow)
  2. Increased allocation of Dev/Test Workflows and Forms
  3. The new Grace Period Policy allowing customers to use Nintex for 60 days without being charged
  4. The Nintex Cloud Accelerator Program (NCAP) was introduced
  5. Small workflows (5 or less actions, no “Start a workflow” action inside) are not counted

Office 365 – Roadmap for 2017

Recently ended video-conference “SharePoint Virtual Summit” (https://resources.office.com/ww-landing-sharepoint-virtual-summit-2017) confirmed rumors regarding upcoming changes and direction of the development Microsoft is planning for Office 365, in terms of “Digital Workplace” – a space dedicated for the employees, providing them with all necessary tools to make their work more efficient and comfy.

Microsoft is focusing mostly on the following products in these terms:

In my opinion this is where the most interesting changes are foreseen.

How to: Import data from XLSX file into SharePoint Online using Nintex

In Nintex 2010, 2013 and 2016 for SharePoint (Standard version even) on-premise of course, there was a possibility to use Excel Services to query and work with the xlsx and xls files’ data. However, in Sharepoint Online there is no such powerful mechanism (well, there are Excel Services available via REST API, but it doesn’t provide that much functionality). Moreover Nintex products for SharePoint Online (neither Nintex Workflow Cloud nor Nintex for Office 365) don’t have any “OOTB” actions that would fill that gap. So in the end, there is no straightforward way to achieve it. So how can I import (and preferably automate it) data from XLSX file into SharePoint?

The most common workaround is to convert the xlsx file into a plain, csv file and then to work with the data from the file using collections (I will write about it in second post).

Recently I have realized, that there is a set of Excel actions in Microsoft Flow! All of us, who has SharePoint Online, has also a free version of Flow available. 

Sharegate migration Nintex

Nintex Workflow Migration from on premise to Office 365

Recently I’ve been involved in that project, where data and information that was being created for years in on premise SharePoints had to be migrated to the Sharepoint Online environment in Office 365. All migration was said to be a simple, straightforward and easy due to the usage of Sharegate, but… the real truth turned out to be way more dark.

Before the real migration started I sat down and started reading about the process and possible obstacles. I can now divide them into 3 groups:

  1. Limitations of Sharegate
  2. Limitations of SharePoint Online
  3. Limitations of Nintex for Office 365.

First things first. I will guide you through all and each from them.

Working with security credentials inside Nintex for Office 365 (RequestDigest, FedAuth, rtFa)

Recently I started playing around with the Nintex O365 Workflow REST API (http://help.nintex.com/en-us/sdks/sdko365/). Although not everything is possible (as saving new workflows), because web request action does not support passing of binary strings and cuts off null bytes (0x00), so the passed file is found by the API as incorrect BUT first thing I faced during my exercise was: HOW TO OBTAIN FedAuth security cookie?

I read articles, reviewed Stackverflow forums and similar looking for an answer how to achieve it using JavaScript. I was a bit upset with the results but then I found this precious article: Remote authentication in SharePoint Online | … And All That JS and everything went clear on how to obtain the cookie inside Nintex Workflow.

The following post is showing how to obtain 3 important security variables, that SharePoint requires from requester to “trust”:

  1. fedAuth cookie
  2. rtFa cookie
  3. RequestDigest token