Experience with Nintex Workflow for SharePoint 2010

After the post about the automation of applications, some colleagues asked me to tell more in detail about the workflow editor of Nintex and about those pitfalls that you can stumble upon using it.



I met this editor exactly 2 years ago, when the chief approached me and said: “If you learn Nintex, you will go to Kazakhstan”. For me, in that period, the career of the best lure simply could not be. I must say that working with this editor for me personally for all these 3 years was more like pleasure and play than work.



I do not want to talk in detail about the possibilities of this product, because, firstly, I do not want a pr-a, and, secondly, this information probably is on some specialized sites. I want to talk about the facts that have become decisive in the choice of Nintex and the pitfalls that I encountered.

Undoubted advantages over the standard SharePoint workflow designer

1. Functional. Over the past 2 years, as an analyst, I have been involved in designing and implementing more than 20 corporate systems on SharePoint 2007/2010 of varying complexity, functionality, and business orientation, and from all this variety of projects I recall only one where the standard Nintex functionality had to be added. The most significant difference from the standard SharePoint functionality is a huge number of logical operations with data (from the usual true / false test to a full state machine, with which you can implement almost any process logic).
2. Easy to learn. I am an analyst, not a programmer. And for me, the undoubted advantage was the possibility of my work with this editor. I’m sure that analysts will understand who are trying to reach developers with their ideas on how to implement customers and stumble upon the phrase “This is unrealizable,” as well as developers who are visited by analysts and try to impose unrealistic requirements. I decided for myself this problem by starting to develop all the workflow processes myself. It saves me time, money to the customer and nerves to my colleagues.
3. Work in the browser. Also, by virtue of my profession, I mainly work on a small laptop with a small performance. I try not to install extra programs on it that eat off RAM, because very often you need to go to the customer to the office and immediately start working. The ability to design workflows directly in the browser for me is just a panacea.
4. The ability to use the GTD approach to building processes. With the experience of implementing corporate IP, I stumbled upon one simple principle: The best information system is one that no one notices. If you have an automation system in your company, for example, applications, but most of the employees do not even know access to it, but hundreds of records are recorded in the system a year, then you have a good system. When users have the opportunity to register, comment, coordinate records through the mail, this allows them to do their work well, without looking up from the main business and not nervous. In the Nintex + SharePoint bundle, most of the workflows can be implemented in such a way that the user will not even have to look into the system.
5. Adding functionality. If the standard functionality is still not enough, then you can always write your actions and use them in the future.

My favorite Nintex features

1. Workflow architecture. Nintex allows you to design not only complex workflows from a functional point of view, but also from the point of view of the system architecture, allowing you to bring to the level of nodes, the types contained both the whole processes and their fragments. This approach saves a huge amount of man-hours on design and makes the development and modification of the system quick and painless. And it's just fun to build the right workflow architecture.
2. LazyApproval. The most popular feature on portal projects, which allows you to coordinate applications directly from the mail notification. It works like this: in the administration center, key phrases are set for agreement / rejection of some action (ok, yes, no, poh, no, no, tries ...). The manager receives a letter containing the maximum information for making a decision without entering the automation system. He responds to the letter with one of the key phrases and forgets about the system until the next letter.
3. State Machine. It is the state machine that fundamentally distinguishes this editor from all its main competitors. I did workflows that contained a dozen nested state machines and they worked and are working with excellent performance. Thanks to this function, making the process of any complexity has become a matter of minutes, not days.
4. Synchronization with AD and user profiles. You can use user data anywhere in the workflow.
5. Auto-running workflows. Compared with the version of the editor of Nintex Workflow 2007, in version 2010, the possibilities for autostarting workflows have been significantly expanded. To the schedule of working processes and simple autorun when creating or modifying SharePoint list items, a conditional launch is added, which occurs with a certain change in the form data. This approach gives additional points to the performance of the designed system.

Actually, the pitfalls

1. Fatal friendship with IE. As everyone knows, since the 2010 version of SharePoint actively supports most of the accepted browsers. Nintex did not follow this path and called on developing processes in Internet Explorer. You can use systems developed using Nintex in other browsers without any problems, but you will have to develop new processes in IE. Since I am a makovod at home, I have to carry a working beech home with me if I need to work in the evenings. In other cases, I try not to pay attention to the fact that I constantly have to work with Explorer. By the way, this is why the article is without pictures.
2. Cost Another disappointing moment is the price of a server license, from which the eyes of small business representatives are often rounded.
3. It is impossible to restart the process in the place where it fell. For example, at some point in the system, some updates or any other apocalypse started on the server, which ate the lion’s share of RAM, and the workflow fell off due to a timeout. So, it will have to restart from the very beginning. If there have already been events in the process involving a bunch of users, imagine their anger when they need to be asked to "reconsider the application again." This problem requires more accurate construction of complex processes.
4. The need for minor improvements at a higher level. Unfortunately, the design of complex processes has not been without modifications at the code level. They touched mainly the display parameters of the process launch buttons. Standard functionality no longer covers, for example, such a requirement as “The function of sending an IT request for execution should be available only to employees included in the Dispatcher group”

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PS The author hopes that this article will be useful to those who regularly encountered the problems of automating business processes on SharePoint. He (the author) never got to Kazakhstan.