Upgrade FAQ

Submit a request through Self service available in Nintex Customer Central to activate the upgrade experience for your tenant and create a SharePoint Online integration in your Nintex Workflow tenant. You must integrate the SharePoint Online tenant to Nintex Workflow before you start upgrading workflows from a SharePoint Online tenant. This integration can be configured through the SharePoint integration feature available under Settings. For more information see, Before you start.

The upgrade tool is built to provide users the ability to move all workflows and task forms from Nintex for Office 365 to Nintex Workflow. Nintex Workflow provides superior workflow capabilities and whilst every effort has been taken to enable upgrading workflows seamlessly, some manual configuration or substituting of actions may be required after upgrading.

The differences between the actions and form controls available in Nintex for Office 365 and Nintex Workflow are described in detail in the Upgrade guide. See, Upgrade guide.

Task forms created in the following form designers can be upgraded to Nintex Workflow:

• Old responsive forms designer

• Classic forms designer

• New responsive forms designer

For more information about form upgrade, seeTask forms.

When you open the workflow, the upgrade availability status is displayed in the workflow designer. The status indicates if the workflow is ready for the upgrade. The actions, controls and functions in the workflow are analyzed to see if the workflow is ready to be upgraded. The following column is added to the workflow gallery:

Upgrade to Nintex Workflow (NWC) status: Indicates the upgrade status the workflow is currently in. When you start the upgrade of a workflow, the Upgrade status displayed for the workflow in the workflow gallery is updated. The different statuses include:

• Getting status: The upgrade status of the workflow will be available soon.

• Ready to upgrade:The workflow is ready to upgrade to Nintex Workflow.

• In progress: Upgrade is in progress.

• Draft created in NWC: The workfow has been upgraded and a draft is in Nintex Workflow. Click the status link to open workflow in Nintex Workflow.

• Completed: The workflow has been upgraded and published in Nintex Workflow and the workflow has been deactivated in Nintex for Office 365.

• Duplicated published workflows: The workflow has been upgraded and published in Nintex Workflow and the workflow is not deactivated in Nintex for Office 365, which may result in duplicate instances.

When you start the upgrade of a workflow, the Upgrade status displayed for the workflow in the workflow gallery is updated. The Upgrade status column describe the status the workflow upgrade is currently in. The different statuses include:

• Not started: The upgrade process has not been started for the workflow.

• In progress: Upgrade to Nintex Workflow is in progress.

• Duplicated process: The workflow has been upgraded and published in Nintex Workflow and the workflow is not deactivated in Nintex for Office 365, which may result in duplicate instances.

• Error: Upgrade ended due to an error.

• Completed: The workflow has been upgraded and published in Nintex Workflow and the workflow has been deactivated in Nintex for Office 365. Any instances that are already in progress for the workflow in Nintex for Office 365 will continue to run even after it is deactivated and published.

The workflow history will not be transitioned to Nintex Workflow.

The tasks will not be upgraded because Nintex Workflow has its own task system that is independent from SharePoint. Any SharePoint tasks will remain in Nintex for Office 365 along with the associated workflow history for customers audit purposes.

Note: Nintex Workflow provides a different task experience with My Nintex. To learn more about My Nintex, see My Nintex.

For security reasons and protection of the credentials and connections that are stored, the connections in Nintex for Office 365 are not moved to Nintex Workflow when you upgrade workflows. Before upgrading workflows with connector actions, you can create the required connections in Nintex Workflow. After the workflow is upgraded you must select the connections in the action configuration panel.

When the upgraded workflow has SharePoint Online actions and if there is a matching connection in Nintex Workflow, the connection is selected automatically in the configuration of the SharePoint Online actions. The connection used will be the first one that matches the tenant URL and the SharePoint Online connection authentication method. If no connections are found a connection is not selected in the action configuration and you must create and select a new connection.

The upgrade tool will access the latest version of the workflow that is stored in the Nintex for Office 365, this may be the latest saved or published version. For example, if there is a published workflow that is subsequently updated and saved, when the upgrade is initiated the latest saved version is the one that will be upgraded.

The workflow in Nintex for Office 365 will continue to run until it's deactivated in Nintex for Office 365. We recommend deactivating the Nintex for Office 365 workflow when publishing it in Nintex Workflow to avoid duplicate instances running. Any instances that are already in progress for the workflow in Nintex for Office 365 will continue to run even after it is deactivated and published.

You can roll back by pausing the workflow in Nintex Workflow and reactivating the Nintex for Office 365 workflow.

Note: The upgrade status for the workflow will remain as ‘Completed’ and will not dynamically update from this point.

To roll back upgrade:

1. Pause the workflow in Nintex Workflow.

2. Reactivate the Nintex for Office 365 workflow.

3. Update the workflow in Nintex Workflow.

4. When ready to resume the workflow, unpause it in Nintex Workflow.

5. Deactivate the workflow again in Nintex for Office 365.

If you come across a situation where many updates are made to the workflow in Nintex for Office 365 after it's upgraded to Nintex Workflow, you can upgrade the workflow again to have the latest version saved in Nintex Workflow.

Another copy of the current version of the workflow is saved in Nintex Workflow. The earlier version of the workflow that was previously upgraded and saved in Nintex Workflow will not be replaced.

If the workflow with the same name exists in Nintex Workflow, the <site name> and a <number> is appended to the name when saving the new workflow in Nintex Workflow.

Workflows names with the following special characters will be replaced with a space because special characters are not allowed in workflow names in Nintex Workflow.

/ ^ $ . | ? * + ( ) < > ! \ @ # % & , [ ] : ; =

Site workflows will be mapped to component workflows in Nintex Workflow. Component workflows can be manually started from the dashboard.

If a workflow has actions that does not exist in Nintex Workflow they are replaced with a placeholder action in the workflow after it is upgraded to Nintex Workflow to preserve the workflow design. You have the option to create the custom connector (if the API exists) on Nintex’s Xtensions framework. The Nintex’s Solution Accelerator Gallery may also have the custom Connector template ready to be used.

See, Nintex Xtensions help documentation and Solution Accelerator Gallery.

A component workflow can be upgraded just like any other workflow. We recommend to upgrade all component workflows first because of the dependencies of the parent workflows that contain actions to call these component workflows.

When a component workflow is upgraded, all variables including the start variables are created as workflow variables in the workflow in Nintex Workflow. After upgrading the workflow you must recreate the start variables in Nintex Workflow and delete them from the workflow variables section.

For information about creating start event variables for component workflows, see Create start variables for your component workflow.

Like a component workflow, it is advised to upgrade all dependent workflows prior to upgrading any workflow using a Start Workflow action.

No, Set workflow status is not supported in Nintex Workflow. The Workflow Status column is a SharePoint Workflow Engine specific construct that cannot be updated outside SharePoint’s workflow engine. We suggest creating a new column in the SharePoint Online list to display the status and using the SharePoint Online - Update items action to update the column manually. For more information about upgrading a workflow that has this action, see the Set Workflow Status Upgrade action article in Nintex Community.

Variables with the following special characters will be replaced with a space because Nintex Workflow does not allow special characters in variable names:

` ! @ ~ / [ ] ^ $ . | * + ( ) \ # % & = { } ' " < > : ; ,

You can edit the variable names in Nintex Workflow if you want after they are upgraded. The special characters that are supported in variables names in Nintex Workflow are: ‘?’ and ‘-‘.

Note: ? at the start of the variable name is not supported.

Settings in Workflow Admin such as Administrators, Workflow Publishers & timeout will not be upgraded and is not available in Nintex Workflow.

We recommend adding appropriate users as administrators and designers as necessary to manage access control to the workflows. Nintex Workflow has a default time out setting where the user will be logged out after 2 hours of inactivity.

Only upgrading of Task forms is supported.

Only Old Responsive and New Responsive task forms are supported in the upgrade.

If you upgrade a workflow that has a task form created in the Classic form designer, after upgrading it is replaced with a default (blank) task form an it must be reconfigured.

For a details of supported form features, see Task forms.

After a process is upgraded all tasks will be managed using Nintex Workflow’s independent task infrastructure removing the link with the underlying SharePoint Task List. Any data captured in the task form will be passed back to the workflow in Nintex Workflow for future processing. If you want to update the original SharePoint list, you have to use a SharePoint item action in workflow to update the list item.

CSS is supported, but JavaScript is not supported in Task Forms in Nintex Workflow. However, plugins are supported and most of the time when you need JavaScript, you can write a plugin to perform that function and achieve your use case.

No, Classic Task Forms are not supported in Nintex Workflow.

The upgrade solution is designed to allow you to continue to leverage Nintex Forms for Office 365 for list form customisation. You can simply write data back to the underlying SharePoint list and allow the workflow in Nintex Workflow process to commence on that data being created / modified in the list. In addition, Nintex Workflow also provides some additional forms capabilities not available in Nintex for Office 365 that may better fit the your requirements, including embedding forms in web pages and true anonymous data collection (similar to Live Forms from on-premises).

No. As the process has moved into a new platform, you will have to configure the Nintex Workflow tenant the process was transitioned into before you can see tasks.

If you have not connected your Nintex Workflow tenant to Nintex Analytics, you will need to create a new connection via the Nintex Analytics portal. See, NIntex Analytics help documentation.