Nintex Invests in Office 365 Workflow Capabilities
    SharePoint-based workflow specialist Nintex this week revealed  significant advances in its solutions for Office 365.
Nintex rolled out a number of usability and mobility functions to its  Office 365-based workflow products and announced a partnership with Sharegate for migrating on-premise Nintex workflows between SharePoint versions and into  the Office 365 cloud. 
A one-time systems integrator, Nintex turned a specialty in SharePoint  workflows into a product that allows users, developers and IT to collaborate on  creating and updating business processes. The channel-centric company has more  than 1,100 partners worldwide, including more than 400 in the United States.
This week, Nintex added several capabilities to its Office 365-focused  product set of Nintex Workflow for Office 365, Nintex Forms for Office 365 and  Nintex Mobile.
"We're rolling out some key enhancements for things related to  approvals, content field data collection on our mobile forms, as well as some  other areas," said Josh Waldo, vice president of channel programs and  strategies at Nintex and a former senior partner executive at Microsoft,   in a telephone interview.
The most appealingly titled of the enhancements is "Lazy Approval,"  which allows natural language e-mail responses such as "yes/no" from  any device to be added to a business process. Lazy Approval does not require  the user to log in to move a process along, making it easy for stakeholders on  the go to stay involved in processes without becoming a bottleneck.
Other new features available to Nintex workflow designers are barcode  scanning, image annotation and a single button tool that allows an end user to  add geolocation information to a form. Also new are the ability to view  multiple outcomes for tasks to make it easier to create workflows based on  complex business logic and cascading lookups, which can do things like create  dependencies between fields, such as country and state.
Nintex, with its U.S. headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., is also  partnering with Montreal-based Sharegate for migrating customer workflows to  the Office 365 cloud in a way that maintains metadata, business logic and  security settings.
For Nintex, with the bulk of its customers using on-premise-based  solutions, Sharegate's expertise and the ability of its tools to maintain  connections between on-premises and cloud solutions in hybrid scenarios were  key, Waldo said.
"We've got a number of customers that have thousands and thousands  of workflows that are sitting on-premises, and they're looking to migrate a  number of those to Office 365 and manage those touch points," Waldo said.
The companies will be demoing their joint solutions next month at the  Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago. Nintex will also be demonstrating its  new capabilities to partners at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in  July in Orlando, Fla., where Nintex is one of the show's top three sponsors.
 
	Posted by Scott Bekker on April 23, 2015