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