Skip to main content

Nintex Workflow | Assign a task action - difference between on premise and office 365


One of the things I've been asking recently is: "what the difference is between the on premise and office 365 version of the assign a task action in Nintex Workflow?

As I often do, I did some googling and was unfortunately unable to find much answers to my question online. So I decided to investigate this myself and write a post to share my observations, and hopefully save some people time looking for the answer.

Before I begin, do note that Nintex are frequently improving the Office 365 version of their workflow platform, and the information shown here could become out of date when they release feature enhancements. As an example, the assign a task action for the Office 365 version recently gained the ability (which was available in the on premise platform) to connect a task action with the Nintex Form product to allow you to customise the task interface users see.

Whilst I will try my best to update this post as new features gets introduced, I would highly recommend keeping an eye out of new features being released from the Nintex Community.

On premise vs Office 365

On Premise - Flexi Task configuration screen
Office 365 - Start a Task Process configuration screen


Comparison of On premise vs Office 365 features
Feature Flexi task (on premise) Start a task process (Office 365)
Create individual task for group members Yes Yes
Lazy approval option Yes Yes
Delegation option Yes No
Create or modify custom task outcomes Yes Yes
Mandatory comments for certain outcomes OOTB task form + Nintex Form task form Nintex Form task form only
Task completion behaviour First response applies; Majority decides; Majority must choose a specific outcome; All must agree; All must agree on a specific outcome Wait for all responses; wait for first response; wait for specific response; wait for percentage of a response
Item Level Permissions (automatically manage unique permission on item related to task) Yes No
Task email notification Yes Parity for the most part with exception of the following features (define from, cc, bcc email address; attachment; IM support)
Due Date Reminder Yes Parity for the most part with the exception of the following features (email capabilities mentioned above, sending of reminder during business day/business hour only)
Escalation (autocomplete or send to another user) Yes Yes (includes business day/hour calculation)
User experience Feature rich Great changes made to reduce the number of clicks required to achieve something. e.g. the insert reference values are now available in to the right of the page as opposed to having to open a dialog box.

Summary

It is definitely great to see the progress Nintex are making in such a short amount of time with bringing feature parity between what was provided in the on premise workflow platform and office 365 equivalent. On the plus side, the changes that have been made to the user interface has really improved the user experience for workflow designers. Although the table above shows that minor gaps still exist between the two SharePoint platforms, from a practical business impact, I see the ability to delegate a task to another user as being the last big feature that I am looking out for.

On a side note, one of the other experiments I have been doing in Office 365, is to change the user assigned to a task to see what would happen. (For those who have not used the Office 365 version, Nintex uses the out of the box task content type which means rights to edit a task form relies on SharePoint permission, on the other hand the on premise version will restrict the ability to edit the task to just the task assignee whilst allowing the admin to delegate the task). During this experiment, I found that changing the user assigned to the task would automatically send an email to the new user of the task even though no delegation feature has yet been implemented in office 365. However unlike the on premise version, the previous user assigned to the task is not notified that their task has been re-assigned to a new user.

Have you used both actions in both SharePoint on premise and Office 365? Have you found additional differences between the platform that I have missed? Please share you experience in the comments below.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

An intro to conditional validation and formatting in PowerApps (using SharePoint as a data source)

The Problem What if we need to create a form that changes it's behaviour based on the answer entered by the user.

For example, we need to build a leave request form that: Shows the comment field if applying for a sick leave, but hides the comment field if applying for a annual leaveRequires the requestor to write a comment if their sick leave is more than 1 day, but is optional if sick for just 1 day.  The default form interface for custom lists in SharePoint Online can be used for basic scenarios, but doesn't provide an easy way to add business logic described above (unless you want to write some javascript)

In the past InfoPath would have been the tool of choice for many, however this tool is now in maintenance mode and whilst it will still be supported for a wee while there will be no improvements or enhancements to the platform.

The Solution This is where PowerApps come in. PowerApps is now the platform that is recommended by Microsoft as a way for business users to create…
Read more

Uploading a file from a SharePoint document library into an Azure Blob Storage with Microsoft Flow (or Logic App)

The Problem One of the things that I've been experimenting with lately is Microsoft Flow. The service allows you to build process automation to facilitate transfer of information from one system to another easily.

One scenario I wanted to try out is to be able to copy/move a file from SharePoint to an Azure Blob Storage. There are a number of reasons that you may want to do this:

Archive files that are no longer neededUpload a copy of a file (usually an image) into a Blob Storage so that images can be hosted in a CDN to optimize page load performance In the past doing something like this would have required some form of custom development e.g. a remote event receiver. However the introduction of Microsoft Flow and Logic Apps has created another alternative that is worth exploring....

Update 30/09/16: If you are looking to put your assets into a CDN to make it load faster, then it's worth checking out the new Preview Release Office 365 Public Content Delivery Network (CDN) capab…
Read more

Only show a control to an employee's manager in PowerApps (using SharePoint as a data source)

The Problem In my previous blog post, I wrote a basic tutorial on configuring PowerApps to conditionally show/hide and make mandatory/optional a control based on the answer provided in a previous control.
In this blog post we will expand on that scenario to create a form that only shows a control called approval status to a user if that logged in user is the manager of the user specified in the employee control.
This means when the manager is using the application, they can change the status to approved. Meanwhile, a user that is not a manager of the person specified in the employee cannot change the status to approved. The Solution Aside from containing a variety of native functions, PowerApps also allow us to add connections to add functionalities into our app. In this case we will add the Office 365 Users connection so that we can get information on: The user that is logged onThe manager of the user specified in the employee controlNote: Whilst this solution makes it difficult for …
Read more