Nintex Process Platform vs. SharePoint Designer (discontinued)

Nintex is best suited when processes are drawed by the business and then can be furter enhanced by IT professionals. When only used by business units we see that there are some lose ends in processes and some bagic process knowledge is needed. Therefore it is wise that the persons in the business who will use Nintex have some basic knowledge on how to set up business processes

Incentivized

SharePoint does not provide, out of the box, a tool to create / update workflows from web. You have to use SharePoint Designer in order to create them. If you need to implement custom workflows for specific business processes, then SharePoint Designer is well suited. SharePoint Designer allows you to create workflows with task approval, email notifications, assign variables and update SharePoint Lists / Documents properties. In our company, we have created specific workflows for : - Purchase order - RH forms validation like annual employee review - Dematerialized existing forms and validation

Incentivized

• Easily build approval process using email and assign a task actions in Nintex Workflow
• Easily manage security at item level with O365 permission action in Nintex Workflow
• Easily use Rule in Nintex Form to build the Input Form and manage the events

Incentivized

• 2013 Workflows - Loops: You can build loops to work while a value (not) equals something, or N number of times. You can insert Parallel Blocks to do multiple things at once, or to watch for multiple things, and when 1 thing finishes, cancels the others and moves to the next step or stage.
• 2013 Workflows - Stages: Previously all we had were steps, which worked sequentially. With the Concept of Stages, we can create blocks of steps and based on the data collected during those functions, we can tell the workflow to go to a different Stage in the workflow based on a set of 1, or multiple, Conditionals in a transition area after each Stage. Giving you the power to develop multiple entire processes and skipping to the correct part of the workflow, rather than going through 20 conditionals to find out you needed to do action 31.
• 2013 Workflows - REST API: the "Call HTTP Web Service" is a very powerful tool, but hard to understand if you have never seen it done, or have a guideline. It works very similar to the requirements in PowerShell to connect and get and post data to SharePoint using the Rest API. You can also use this to manage permissions on List Items, Lists, Sites, and Site Collections. Best part is when developed correctly, it is SUPER FAST!
• Intentionally Building Infinite Loops: I have built multiple review process from Managing Certifications to Updating Published Documentation, that monitors when an Item, based on provided approved metadata, when the "Author" needs to review the document within the given amount of time. They will get e-mails with links asking if changes are needed. If not, it is routed to the Approving Executive, and the Workflow Automatically updates the Metadata to push out the review dates to the next date, based on metadata provided on how how often the document should be reviews. By using conditionals in the transition of stages, it basically starts over, and goes into a parallel block to allow the monitoring of multiple values of metadata to move to the next stage. Very Powerful when you want to automate these types of process. It truly is a "Set It and Forget It" process.

Incentivized

• Adding Machine learning features like the "Image and Text Automation" component, which allows bots to extract data from unstructured sources like scanned documents or PDFs.
• Natural language processing (NLP) features to understand and interpret human language, which can be useful for tasks like customer service or data entry. mostly for middle east countries where Arabic language is used.
• Integration with external systems where many industries uses their own legacy systems and they need RPA bot to interact with their systems as well.
• Adding More OCR tools for Document data extraction and dynamic content.

Incentivized

• In the newest version of SharePoint Designer, they have gotten rid of the Design view which makes what used to be quick and easy changes much more code-intensive. This makes it harder for non-IT users and is more risker for all SharePoint Designer users.
• SharePoint Designer workflows have a lot of functionality, but there are also some crucial limitations, such as not being able to put lookup fields in email subjects or using parenthesis to separate/group logical conditions.
• Although this goes along with the Design view, there really isn't a good user interface anymore for adding conditional formatting and styles in views/pages.

Incentivized

We are currently investigating which collaboration platform best suits our needs. Chances are that we move to SharePoint Online and then we're going to also consider the microsoft power platform (power automate and power apps) to develop forms and workflows. Aspecially the pricing model for the cloud is currently a blocking factor to go for the Nintex solution in the Cloud.

Incentivized

It is a helpful tool that we use every day.

Incentivized

Based on the on-prem experience with this tool, I believe that they have a lot of potential to help the online version catch up to where the on-prem left off. Nintex developed their online version and it is not as fully formed or capable compared to the on-prem version, and the licensing model scales back what we would have liked to be an expansion or at least continuous improvement of existing flows. It is also not near as user friendly specifically to non-developers and has an uncanny similarity to Microsoft Flow in the online instance. Consistent with my reviews of the tool - I believe they have some good approaches to design thinking that, if translated well from on-prem to online, could make this a clear winner again.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The trainer addressed the smallest queries in a friendly and timely manner; He walked us through all the necessary products we were using

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

test runs for key persons to insure the system is set up prior to rolling out I think the platform is good, I think the roll out and the local implantations is where we are failing as a company in using Nintex

Incentivized

It's much more reasonably priced and we were able to actually experience the platform for a bit before we made a decision. And by the time our demo was finished we had already started depending on it for some of our processes so it would've been very hard to separate from it

I haven't used anything else like this. I use different products for workflows and forms, but they aren't listed in the listings for this page. Instead of using it for workflows or forms (deprecated 2 years ago), I use Nintex. For everything else, I have what I need in the Modern version of SharePoint online

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We have saved our company thousands of dollars by creating our own customer support system rather than using a 3rd party tool.
• The ability to generate documents/PDFs in workflows has solved a great number of process issues for us and groups who had previously been using paper documents.
• Automating many permissions updates through workflows has been a huge time saver for repetitive processes.

Incentivized

• For my needs, I have not found SharePoint Designer useful for my day to day maintenance of SharePoint. It is useful for viewing all the objects that make up the SharePoint site.
• It is not as intuitive in regard to setting up Workflows. I have yet to use it to set up workflows in SharePoint. Maybe if I needed more complex workflows, it would be beneficial.
• I like to use SharePoint Designer for moving around files within SharePoint sites.

Incentivized