The Nintex K2 platform is not only efficient and developer-friendly, but the support provided by the vendor is also highly commendable. The platform's ease of use and robust functionality make it a preferred choice for developers, while the vendor's exceptional support ensures smooth implementation and ongoing assistance, enhancing overall user satisfaction.
Well Suited - WORKFLOWS! To a SharePoint Developer, workflows are like a hammer to a carpenter. If there is a business process that needs automation, the first thing I look to is what are we automating? What/where is the data? How can we minimize the number of keystrokes by end-users to get from the start to finish? The answer to all of these is "build a workflow". With the introduction of "Call HTTP Web Service" action, you can now access data anywhere in a site collection and consume it in any site, on any list, for any form. SharePoint Designer Workflows makes the SharePoint world go round. Less Appropriate - Building SharePoint Pages I have attempted to use SharePoint Designer to build custom pages, but it just is the worst tool to use. There are many other tools to use to develop customized pages. The techniques of designing custom page layouts, CSS files to populate in pages, JavaScript Snippets for pages have changed so much over the years, and SharePoint Designer did not change with them. In fact, it is my opinion the 2013 version made it 100 times more difficult than the 2010 Version.
SharePoint Designer offers more granularity of customizing a workflow that is more sophisticated solution that can effectively delegate tasks to responsible parties and reflects status updates of task status.
SharePoint Designer allows SharePoint professionals the ability to customize a SharePoint site with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript that can be integrated in .ASPX pages.
SharePoint Designer offers form customization where Office products such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint cannot meet specific government requirements and or expectations.
Difficult to fix flows that are in process (such as re-assigning a task for someone that is OOO or has left the company).
Nintex support team does not have resolution SLAs (only acknowledgment SLAs). Occasionally this has led to key issues taking weeks to resolve.
The number of integrations available is impressive, however, sometimes key methods are not available within an integration. This has been improving significantly in the past 2 years as the platform has matured.
Navigation between sub-sites and beyond the entry point is not seamless. I find it difficult to get to the root of a directory structure if I have not started there.
Would love to be able to do WYSIWYG in some form. I have only used it for a year but I have not found anything fancy to do.
I would like to be able to work in a development site and easily move to the production site.
Renewal is mainly on the fact that Nintex is so widely used and it would be impossible to migrate all of these existing workflows to another engine. Third-party lock-in within SharePoint is pretty strong, which makes it difficult to move to something else. Our Nintex database is well-over 100 GBs. Nintex email support is very good, and I've been impressed. The Community however is non-existent and filled with unanswered questions.
Nintex Workflow does exactly what it is advertised to do: make workflow development fast and easy. It doesn't provide very much new functionality, but it isn't really supposed to. When I am working with a client on a SharePoint project, I am always happy if I hear that they use Nintex Workflow, as it makes workflows much easier.
The Nintex Process Platform has never crashed or had any availability issues during my usage. However there was an issue that was of my own making that caused a slowdown of the system. I had set up a process to run once a day and check for employees on a list that had certain parameters selected, and for some reason that I had to troubleshoot, the process instead ran constantly, which filled the cache quickly. I ended up having to dismantle that process so the system didn't crash.
Unlike any other process automation product out there. Not only is it a low-code, easy to use tool for building processes in environments like SharePoint or Salesforce, they have really started to expand their tool-set by offering tools to manage other things like process mapping, RPA, mobile,etc.
The support team works as fast as they can and they are usually fast to solver the issues. Sometimes they need more time to solve one of them because our workflows and so on are more complex than usual clients.
Support is good from Microsoft. They are quite responsive when we raise a ticket but SP Designer support will be ended by Microsoft in the near future as they have got new techs like PowerApps and Flow to achieve the same functionality SP Designer does and even more than that.
I used the Nintex training software, it was easy to watch and follow along. It didn't go too fast and was descriptive enough to understand what the steps needed were in order to produce efficient workflows and user friendly forms.
1.Start with Simple Workflows: Begin with basic workflows to gain user confidence before tackling complex processes. 2.Involve Stakeholders Early: Engage business users and IT early to align workflows with real business needs. 3.Comprehensive Training: Invest in user training to ensure smooth adoption and reduce resistance. 4.Leverage Prebuilt Templates: Use Nintex’s templates to speed up implementation and maintain consistency. 5.Iterate and Optimize: Continuously improve workflows based on user feedback and performance metrics.
I was not part of selecting Nintex, but I think Nintex does a better job of generating linear flowcharts vs. Microsoft Visio because it automates the majority of the process of creating process maps. (Microsoft Visio is better for creating flowcharts that are not linear. because it is less automated and more flexible.)
In order to simplify our internal workflows, we have installed additionnal tool for our SharePoint platforms : Nintex Workflow and forms. Compared to Nintex, SharePoint Designer is very far away. I am only talking here for 2 main features of SharePoint Designer : - Workflows - Forms But for these 2 features, Nintex is way above SharePoint Designer
The scalability is really bottlenecked by the imagination of the user. I was able to make processes for my own personal usage, making my daily tasks easier. I was also able to make processes that affected hundreds of employees, making large standardization and efficiency gains. So either way, the system is used the same way, and I was the limiting factor.
People have woken up to the amount of overlap after mapping their processes.
People can be resistant to process changes. You need to have the support from above or support from the 'business' that you are process changing to be able to see the positive impacts.
Numbers talk. if you can get a general salary figure from your HR dept to show savings for 'employee bands', then when you present reports, they will be all the richer in data.
With workflows alone we have had a positive ROI because it gives us increased functionality and value with a smaller amount of development time needed.
The testing of workflows or pages is more structured and we have less base cases than a ground-up customized development solution.
Occasionally, we will have a negative impact on our ROI based on the work-arounds needed to make SharePoint Designer work for a specific project, but overall there has been more positive impacts than negative.
