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WORKFLOWS & FORMSDEPLOYMENT

Table of Contents

Introduction

What Are Workflows

What’s Nintex?

And The Question Is…

The Current Process

The Risks of This Process

Is It Better With Nintex & Sharegate?

Streamlined Process with Nintex & Sharegate

About Sharegate

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I’m sure many of you will agree when we say SharePoint is a very large and capable platform, with a wide range of features and functions. From security and governance to document management, Intranets, social and web content management, …

Its capabilities are huge, almost limitless. In this eBook, we will take a look at one of those features in particular - Workflows and Forms.

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Introduction

What are Workflows, and 
Why Would You Need Them?

Every company, no matter their size, uses some kind of workflow or business process automation to improve productivity. Think of a new employee joining the company; he needs a desk, an email account, an introduction, fire safety training, maybe even business cards to be created and printed.

Let’s take another example - document approval in its simplest form. An editor creates a document, submits it to his manager for review, and it's published afterwards. Two common examples for many organizations, these workflows can be both complex and simple. SharePoint offers some rich workflow features, but there are certainly some gaps . For example, communication with line-of-business systems usually involves custom development, and the workflow designer in SharePoint Designer has several ‘quirks’ that limit its usefulness.

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What’s Nintex?

Yes, SharePoint has its limits, and it's a good thing to know them.

Thankfully, as it's often the case, the Microsoft Partner Network have stepped in to solve the problem. In this case, it's Nintex with their highly popular Nintex Workflows and Forms products.

For those not au fait with Nintex, their tools allow business users to create awesome workflows and forms without any kind of customization. In the case of on-boarding a new employee, Nintex is able to automatically create Active Directory accounts, which would ordinarily involve heavy and complex custom development.

The Nintex visual designer allows business users to build powerful tools fitting their specific needs with ease.

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http://www.nintex.comhttp://www.nintex.com/workflow-platform/nintex-workflowhttp://www.nintex.com/workflow-platform/nintex-forms

Why create a workflow in a development environment instead of doing it straight into production?

When complex workflows must be developed, it’s good practice to do so in a separate development environment. A developer can create the workflow there, without interrupting “business as usual”. It would be risky to do this in a production environment as this may break other things, resulting in a poor experience for end users and even loss of time and money as people cannot get on with their jobs, not to mention potential data losses.

Once the developer is done with the creation, a tester can then try this workflow before it's deployed to a staged environment for a business user to test further. This testing process may be complex, especially if the workflow or form integrates with line-of-business systems. Only once it has passed all tests should the workflow be moved to a l i v e s y s t e m , o r p r o d u c t i o n environment as it's often called.

If the solution uses an ‘Out of the box’ SharePoint workflow it's very difficult to move it between environments, and maintain all of the data and audit information needed.

And the Question Is:

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The Current Process of Creating and Copying Workflows Between Environments

Let’s assume the tool you use to create and develop workflows is SharePoint Designer. The process to copy an out-of-the-box SharePoint workflow between environments from development, to staging, to production, will normally look like the following:

1. A developer creates the workflow in a development environment

2. A QA developer examines the workflow in this environment

3. If it is approved, the workflow is recreated in a staging environment

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4. The developer and tester both test the workflow in the staging environment

5. A business user then tests the workflow in staging. If any issue is found (which is likely), the process starts again from the beginning

6. If the business user is happy, the workflow is recreated in production

7. Developer, tester, and business user test the workflow in production

The Risks of This Process

As you can see, there are a lot of manual steps involved. There’s some obvious disadvantages; even with very highly skilled people, errors will inevitably be made. Besides that, the process is repetitive work. If you’re striving for efficiency, this wouldn’t score particularly highly. Visual Studio does allow packaging workflows as a template, to help and enable deployment across environments. The downside is that it's for very advanced users only.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE DIFFERENCES

Click below to read the TechNet article on the differences between developing workflows in

SharePoint Designer vs Visual Studio.

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https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj163199.aspxhttps://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj163199.aspxhttps://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj163199.aspxhttps://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj163199.aspxhttps://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj163199.aspx

In short, yes. Nintex Workflows can now be created in a development e n v i r o n m e n t , a n d t h e n c o p i e d a u t o m a t i c a l l y t o s t a g i n g u s i n g Sharegate. There's no room for error here, the workflow is duplicated to the destination environment. The same is true for promoting to production. This process allows developers to easily fix issues in workflows that were created directly in production. Instead of trying to fix the issues in production, the workflow can be copied to a development environment first . You can then make all the c h a n g e s y o u wa n t t o f i n d t h e problem, without interrupting the workflow on production.

Is it better with Nintex & Sharegate?

E v e r y c o m p a n y h a s w o r k f l o w s . Automating them using SharePoint workflows will bring efficiency and is less prone to errors than manual processes. While out-of-the-box workflows in SharePoint are quite rich, in most cases, you'll find that they're lacking features. Nintex is an awesome add-on for SharePoint to create advanced workflows without any technical knowledge or custom development. But they need to be put together using the right process, with proper testing. This involves multiple environments and systems. Our relationship with Nintex now means we can help take the pain out of this process to let you focus on improving your productivity.

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http://en.share-gate.com/?utm_source=deploynintexebook&utm_medium=ebook&utm_campaign=ebooknintex

Streamlined Process with Nintex & Sharegate

1. Create or edit the workflow

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2. Test the workflow

3. If it is approved, it’s deployed

With Nintex & Sharegate, no need to spend long hours recreating Workflows, worrying about quality issues, asking different parties for their input at different stages of development. Nintex' Workflow Designer is intuitive and easy to use while Sharegate moves things through simple drag & drops.

Combine the two, and you get a three main steps to this process. You create/edit the workflow, test it and deploy it. That’s it!

As easy as 1, 2, 3. Repeat these steps for any given environment and you got yourself a simple solution to your workflow migration mayhem.

Since you copy a proven workflow instead of rebuilding the whole thing, you get the insurance everything works at destination. Now that's smooth sailing!

DEPLOY MY WORKFLOWS & FORMS NOW

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We are

Sharegate was born in 2011 from the observation that the available SharePoint tools were way to complicated to use, thus distracting users from improving their business proficiency. We have built a simple to use, yet extremely powerful Management tool for SharePoint, Office 365 and OneDrive for Business. We believe life should be Just Damn Simple, dealing with SharePoint included.

We aim to be your SharePoint & Office 365 Management one-stop-app. Migrate anything from workflows to multiple Site Collections from a farm or version to another can be done with a single drag & drop. Run reports to ensure your company data are safe and identify potential threats. Manage your content to guarantee the compliance of your entire environments with bulk edition, metadata preservation, and much more!

Sleep tight at night, using Sharegate.

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