Nintex workflows and forms make it easy to automate business processes in SharePoint. But deploying them across different servers? That can be a major headache. Luckily, ShareGate can help out! Here’s how:
Planning on running automated businesses processes on your SharePoint? Nintex workflows and forms can help you do it so simply! From customizing your forms to conducting complicated tasks without any coding knowledge—that’s what Nintex offers to its customers!
But deploying them between your different servers can become very tedious, and open the door to many mistakes and errors! Luckily, ShareGate is more than just a Nintex migration partner—it’s also a great workflows and forms deployment tool!
How to deploy your Nintex workflows and forms with ShareGate
Whether you’re considering using Nintex workflows and forms for your organization or you already use it, this video will help you better understand the benefits of using ShareGate to deploy and migrate them. Let’s take a look:
Please note this webinar was recorded in October, 2015.
Video transcript
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening even. Thanks for joining. My name is Benjamin Niaulin. Today, we’re going to be looking over Nintex workflows and forms deployment using ShareGate Desktop. So again, thank you for joining. We’re very excited to be showing this today and we’re very thankful, of course. that you have taken your time to join us on this wonderful Tuesday, and perhaps it’s even not Tuesday anymore for some of you.
So just to get a little bit of a welcome going on, I do want to say that this presentation is being recorded so that it is going to be made available if you want to share it with your teams, with your colleagues, with anyone else afterwards, or just watch it again for the fun of watching it again. You’ll be more than able to, of course.
Now, joined with me are a couple of my colleagues and friends, really. We just happen to work at the same company and they’re here to answer of your questions whether they’re sales-related questions, whether they’re technical questions. We have the developers that built these solutions, we have the people on the phone for support that usually answer questions for this. So you’ll definitely be able to get all of this.
All right. So, we’ll get started now and what we are going to be able to look at is this Nintex Workflows and forms deployment. So just quickly before we begin, so know who’s talking to you, I think everyone’s muted. My name is Benjamin Niaulin. I am French, we are all French here at ShareGate. The office is based here in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Home of the poutine and home of hockey.
Obviously I work at ShareGate, this is what we’re here for. And I’m an Office 365 MVP. So what we try to do is not only do we provide you with the tools for you to do migrations, management and deploy your Nintex Workflows for all your business automation processes, but we’re also focused on being at the edge of technology to see what goes on every day, and try to bring you with the helpful information.
So if you visit the blog at the ShareGate website, you’ll see tons of useful information. You’ll also notice on our support page that we do have an e-book covering what I’m going to talk to you about today, what Nintex deployments, even. There’s my French coming back up. So definitely check those out.
And before anything else, I guess let’s just get to it. Thanks again for joining, everyone. My group of webinar keeps popping up so you’ll see that in the recording. It’s quite interesting. I’m just going to go ahead and continue.
So, of course, Nintex and ShareGate, not even a year ago, right, back in May during Ignite, the big Microsoft conference where Microsoft was putting even more emphasis on Office 365 as a hybrid solution for on-premises, we’ve recently learned that SharePoint 2016 is coming out. The IT preview’s already available. ShareGate’s already ready for that, of course. There is Office 365 portals coming, new features coming out. SharePoint 2016 in a couple of months, in Q2 of 2016. So obviously we’re looking at all of this and we need to be able to not only migrate, but also deploy afterwards.
So what Nintex and ShareGate have done is a couple of months ago got together, and after looking at many tools that allow you to move things around in SharePoint environments, Nintex has selected ShareGate as the only recommended migration tool which allows you to copy, move forms and workflows as well perfectly.
We’ve even gone all the way from Montreal, we flew all the way to Melbourne in Australia where they have developers, Nintex developers working on their workflows, working on their forms, so that we can provide the best experience possible for you to move and migrate workflows around. It is extremely vital that is a seamless experience and that you don’t have to worry about copying them around. It has to be easy. So you’d be happy to know that Nintex and ShareGate have created a really healthy relationship.
And we often touch base with their developers. We even fly there, they come here in Montreal. We both visit our own home cities, and make sure that we provide those best experience, of course, at an affordable price, which was a big factor for choosing ShareGate as the deployment tool or migration tool, because we are the only ones, the only ones that will not charge you by gigabyte that you move, or by number of servers or tenants that you have.
You can get ShareGate once, and that person using ShareGate will be able to deploy, will be able to migrate, will be able to bring those forms across, those workflows across and even more once you see what’s in store for us today. So very exciting. I hope you are, too. Don’t hesitate to tweet all about this. ShareGate and Nintex working better together is awesome.
All right. So, it’s funny, I was at a conference, actually I was at a couple of conferences, and maybe I saw you and Oslo, Norway two weeks ago, maybe in Los Vegas last week and maybe in Branson, Missouri just this weekend. That’s right. That was fun. But somebody told me something very interesting there. The person came up to me and said, “You know what’s interesting? When you get SharePoint, it feels like you’ve got to get ShareGate and Nintex as well.” It works together, it comes with the package. You don’t just get SharePoint, you need Nintex for those easy workflows. Their own slogan is “Workflows for everyone.”
You want to be able to automate those business processes. You have the list, you have the libraries, but how do you automate that and remove some of those paper approvals, those transfers, so that they’re fully automated, they’re mobile-friendly, they work on any device obviously, and that they’re intelligent, there’s smart logic applied to it.
But of course, you also get ShareGate because it’s easy to move things across, it’s easy to migrate. But since we don’t charge by gigabyte, the story continues beyond that as we’ve added security management features as well, as we added reporting features as well. So ShareGate now has become the admin and management tool for every SharePoint environment out there, both on-premises and Office 365, and Nintex has become that workflow and that business automation tool available for SharePoint.
So when I say SharePoint these days, it actually does mean this whole package together. That makes a lot of sense, that makes that whole experience a whole lot better both for you, your business and obviously your customers if you’re a consulting company.
So in case you don’t know what Nintex is, let me just go over it very quickly, and maybe I’ll go over some demos. Of course, there’s demos today. We’re not going to be looking at slides. Do not worry, we’re going to see it in action. But essentially if you’re not familiar with Nintex, you open up a list, you open a library. If you want, we can even go ahead and create one quickly here.
I’m going to open up my Windows here and, oh, wow, look at ShareGate. ShareGate looks amazing! But that’s not what I want to look at right away. I’m in my SharePoint 2013 environment, and I could choose anything. I could go into the side contents tab and decide to add a new app. So you could be creating a new custom list or you can use one from the templates.
See the announcement list, for example, we’ll it call News and click on Create. Now, once that is created…where is that News? There we go. Of course, you have the regular out-of-the-box SharePoint stuff and you click on new and, yeah, all right, how does that respond on your iPhone or mobile devices? Not perfect really, is it?
So of course, we can go to List, we can to Nintex Forms, for example, and we could create a brand new form to display those fields that we have. So this is already what it’s looking at. I can remove this image. I can replace the image with an image from my Assets library, I can go ahead and choose some fields that I want to add for the user to enter. Let’s go back to the Nintex Form here. I can provide a smartphone layout as well. So I can already adapt this very quickly for my list, for my forms.
So if you haven’t looked at Nintex in the past, this is a great, great tool to look at to make the whole experience overall better. There’s tons and tons of features here I can…I’m not going to spend time here today, obviously, looking at what we can do with the settings, with the layouts. But needless to say, you have complete power over what you do here, whether you’re in starting things from somewhere else, whether you’re starting a new workflow, whether you want to add some fields that are connected to one of your SharePoint columns. It is really, really powerful.
And of course, besides this, let me close this form right here, for this list, I can also create what we call Nintex Workflows, which is available where you would create your SharePoint Designer when you’re on-premises. Here, you could say, “I would like create a new Nintex Workflow.” You’ve got some out-of-the-box templates or you can start from scratch, and in this case, you click on Create.
What you’ll have on the left-hand side is a list of actions, what they call workflow actions, whether they are with user interaction or just typical list of library actions, you can take them, copy the items.
So when the workflow starts, what do we want to do? We want to create an item somewhere else. So you click on Create an Item, you double-click it, you see what you want to do, and it is that easy. I’ll create an item in the list called Awesomeness because we’re working with ShareGate here, of course. The field that we want to modify is Title.
And what is the value that we want to put in this list? Well, we can take something from the current item’s properties such as the announcements or the news title or the created buyer or any other properties using Nintex forms to automate what you have at the office, based on those needs that you have is definitely, definitely powerful. I’m giving you some very quick examples because at this point, all I’m really doing is introducing you to Nintex so that we know what we’re talking about as we’re going along.
Of course, Nintex is a third party product, that goes without saying, but the actions that you have, the logics, the operations available, calculate fields, beyond what you would have out-of-the-box is really, really incredible. You can even go ahead and create an Active Directory user.
Think about those scenarios that you have at the office that are complicated to automate, like those vacation requests. We’ve had that problem for a long time, even here at ShareGate before we started using Nintex to automate that. How do people ask for vacation? Who do they have to get it approved from? Where does it go? Is there a calendar that has all of that information? So why not completely automate that? Why not create a list with a nice form that you can fill off from your phone if you’re at home, that’s always available, that creates the right information and the right location? Really, really powerful in that case.
For a second there, I thought I was working for Nintex now. Of course, we’ve got to use ShareGate, no worries, no worries. So, let’s go back into our presentation and see. We know what Nintex Forms are, we know what Nintex Workflows are, so let’s continue.
So typical day at the office or typical start with your Nintex – you’ve gotten Nintex as a third party, you looked at it, you wanted to automate some of those processes, you want it to make your life easier a little bit. So what did you do? All right, you created your SharePoint site that’s a test site collection. You’re obviously not working in production, I hope. Of course, you can, but not ideal in many cases. So you’re testing your workflow, you’re investing time. You’re putting your own time and effort figuring it out.
You build the workflow, you build the forms that go with it, you test it, of course, which is the next step. You make sure that it works on mobile devices. You make sure that the forms are all right. You have this on a test site, you test the list and libraries. You add any missing actions. You make sure the workflow runs smoothly, that there’s no errors. You simulate multiple users. You ask your colleagues, your friends to run the workflow at the same time, so that even if there’s 5 or 10 or 20 people doing that at the same time, that there is no crashes in SharePoint.
So you’ve gone through all of that process seamlessly and you’re ready to go, right? But wait, how are you going to get the workflow to the next location now, right? You’ve been doing this in the testing phase, you’ve been doing this in a testing site collection, you make sure that the workflow works, you make sure that the forms work, you’ve tested it with your phones, you’ve tested it with everything. And now, you want to copy the workflow and the forms somewhere else, and there’s no easy way.
Nintex provides you with an export function, but truth be told, there’s a lot of things that don’t…it’s ideal if you’re exporting it to reimport it. Like the name says, it’s to export. It is not a move, it is not a copy. The idea here is to export your configuration if you want to bring it back within the same site or site collection, and even then, within the site collection. Because sometimes, let’s say you have a workflow that runs on a list or a document library, and what you really need it, what the workflow does is create another list item in another list. So, now you have a dependency to another list or another document library.
So what happens is when you export those workflows, those references won’t be kept adequately. Sometimes the URLs will still be pointing to the original location. So you can’t really use that to deploy workflows from a testing to QA to production environment. You can’t really migrate your workflows to the next version, and you can’t really provide…
There’s a couple of times where I needed to provide a template every time my users were going to create a news list, or an announcement list, or calendar list in SharePoint. I wanted to be able to use that list or use that library as a template so that as I copy that across my multiple sites, my multiple site collections, they’d be up and running within minutes. I won’t have to recreate that entire workflow. And that is what we’re talking about here. So that’s what the problem is today. Even at Nintex, they’re providing examples and demos to their environments, and they need to come up with some PowerShell scripts to…
Needless to say, when it comes down to providing that experience, when you want it to deploy workflows and forms, when you want to copy them across somewhere else, it starts becoming complicated. So what is that story? What is that deployment story? How do you do this – dev, to QA, to production environment?
Well, it’s complicated. Let’s walk through that story together, and let’s see what exactly is happening when you’re in that as a business or as a developer. You don’t really need to be a developer. I shouldn’t have chosen that word when I was in there because workflows for Nintex is really workflows for everyone. So let’s replace the word that you see on the screen that says Developer, and let’s go through that story and see what that experience is like.
Well, first, you create the workflow in a development environment, I hope, or in a staging environment. But at least you’re not doing it in production. And even if it is in production, let’s go through the steps. Then you have a QA developer or a QA, a business user that comes and examines the workflow in the environment and the next environment to make sure that it works in a staging environment that makes sense, that it’s not going to corrupt or break anything else that wasn’t foreseen beforehand.
If it’s approved, the workflow is recreated in the staging environment. The developer, the person that created it, and the tester, both test the workflow in the staging environment to make sure that all is good in that location now. And we continue on. Then a business user then test the workflow in staging to make sure that they don’t find any user experiences, any issues with that either. The process starts again from the beginning because now we go back and make those modifications, and so on and so on.
Then we go and the business user’s happy with the workflow. How do you get to production environment? Well, the workflow has to be recreated. So you go back from the start, except that now you’re not working in development environment, you’re working in the production environment. So you go again and you recreate the workflow from scratch.
And again, don’t get me wrong, there are some ways to export and import workflows with Nintex. And perhaps if you’ve done some very basic workflows in the past, you could think, “Well, I didn’t have any issues with that.” Well, wait a minute. Wait until you get to those more complex and more detailed workflows that start doing quite a bit of things, that start referencing other lists and libraries where you truly have those automated business processes come in, with documents, with approvals, with customers, CRM, and all of that good stuff. You want that experience to be smooth, you want it to work every single time as well, which is crucial in this example.
So how do we solve this? I think you know where we’re going with this. Because that was the title of the presentation, Benjamin. Yes, of course. And, yes, I do talk to myself and I’m French. Yeah, right. So how do we do this? How do we solve that problem where we can’t move our workflows and our forms easily between environments? And of course, we got to keep it simple. The whole reason we bought Nintex, the whole reason we’ve got these deployments everywhere is to keep it simple, is to give this back to the business for them to create what they need.
So if they start creating and then you need to be there again with complex PowerShells, you’re going back to square one. And of course, tada! that’s where ShareGate comes in. And depending on what you know about ShareGate, it’s very important to understand that ShareGate has an overall admin management tool, both for on-premises and Office 365. It does allow you to go between versions, but it also allows you to do so much more to copy within the same environment.
We are, once again, the only ones that will not charge you by the gigabyte, or by the number of servers, or by anything really other than the affordable price you paid to get ShareGate in the first place. And that comes with security management. And we’re going to take a look at all of that after we look at that workflow experience and that form experience, of course. But when you get ShareGate packaged with SharePoint packaged with Nintex, you truly start getting full control over your environment and make the most out of your investment in SharePoint and in Nintex quickly and easily.
So let’s go through it just in case. Sometimes, in the past, people have perceived ShareGate as a small company from Montreal. Not at all. Today, we’re over, I think we’re over 60 now. I can’t even count that. Our customers count 10,000 organizations throughout the world. We have large, we have enterprise customers, we have small, medium businesses. There’s all kinds of customers using ShareGate today, both for their migration, for deployments.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I forget where I was, actually, yeah, back when I was in Norway, one of our customers was telling us that there were actually different ShareGate to the entire SharePoint team, as well as the support team. So that every time people called them and needed to move a library across, or split a site into two sites, or the one that comes up very often is to merge sites together or promote a sub-site into a site collection, so the people would call support. These would be the people in marketing and R&D and sales.
And then like we’re merging sites. There’s been a reorg, and we need to bring all of that to the destination. We need to merge it, we need to bring the info path forms, we need to bring the user alerts, we need to bring the versioning, we need to map some of these data, we need to change it, we need those Nintex Workflows, the Nintex Forms. So they give ShareGate to that support team so that within their environment, they could copy things around and reorganize and restructure what they have, all the while keeping the integrity of their data and their complex workflows that had been created.
And last thing about ShareGate that you should definitely know is that before the big Microsoft Conference at Ignite, we were approached by Microsoft themselves. Microsoft had plans on working on a new, incredibly fast way to bring content from on-premises or file shares into Office 365. And they chose to work with us. Once again, ShareGate was selected, and Microsoft has been working with Microsoft ever since very tightly to bring you the fastest possible way to go to Office 365.
So when you have your on-premises content…we’re talking about deployments in the future. This is going to mean in a hybrid environment where you have some things in on-premises and some things in Office 365. You’re going to want to be able to copy your forms, your workflows seamlessly between one and another, and back and forth. You want to be able to go from Office 365, back to on-prim. Today, with our exhaustive benchmark test that we have made, we’re happy to say that what used to be a 500 megs an hour content migration to Office 365 is now a 37 gigs an hour.
Obviously there’s going to be a lot of factors that come into play, including your own SharePoint server, your hard drives, your SQL server, and your own bandwidth. But now, we’re able to bring up to 35 and 37 gigs an hour to Office 365. So imagine that library with that content, those approvals, those workflows, those forms that you’ve created, and being able to bring all of that into your Office 365 destination in just an hour or just a few minutes. It’s truly incredible.
So once again, I wanted to share that because it is important to note that Microsoft had looked at all of this. And now we have a very, very high percentage of all migrations in the world going to Office 365 are using ShareGate. Truly incredible.
So yeah, let’s get started. So what does it copy? When you’re using ShareGate…and, oh, my goodness, I forgot to say something extremely important. ShareGate runs on your desktop. Folks, you don’t even have to worry about installing anything on your SharePoint server or contacting IT, necessarily. You can get ShareGate on your desktop and it will work seamlessly with your on-prem environment and your Office 365 environment. We’re going to see this in my next demo anyway, but this is something that’s truly noteworthy for this.
So we’re going to look at what does it copy, what does it move and what does it migrate? Because although they are all the same thing when you’re using ShareGate, it’s important to know that for a user, they are different. Some people want to copy, some people want to move and some people want to migrate to change version of SharePoint at the same time. So let’s explore ShareGate together very quickly before we start looking at copying those workflows and those forms, and see what that experience is like from a user perspective.
I’m going to go ahead and open up my Windows. I’m going to go back into that site that I was in. Oh, of course, leave this page. All right. And what I’m going to do is you have ShareGate, and you probably have noticed how the interface’s easy to use, is friendly. And I don’t mean it’s pretty. Having a pretty interface, anyone can do. You get a designer, they design something. What we mean by a good user interface is that it’s easy to use. It’s not just pretty.
So you’ll notice that we have a couple of things. We have an explorer, we have migration, we have reports. And we have given you the capability to find what you need to find in your environment as an administrator. As a power user, you’re going to be able to do that. And truly, experience here is remarkable.
You can drag and drill down in your environment, look at a site-to-site collection, get general information and get security information on it, generate a matrix report on permissions and see who has access to what, export that into Excel, expand groups and see who are the users and what permissions do they have in there. Very, very practical. We can even expand on Active Directory groups. So very practical. But we’ll look at all of that later on.
What we want to focus on right now is what does the copy, move or migrate features allow you to do? For that, I’m going to click on Launch Migration, and that’s going to open up this part of ShareGate that focuses on copying content or copying structure from one place on the left to the destination on the right, even if it is the same form or same tenant in Office 365, as well between the two.
So you’ll notice that our interface provides you a couple of things. The first thing you want to do if go to File, Options, and you want to go under Performance and make sure you’ve got it set to the maximum so that you do a lot more in the same operation and make that a lot faster overall. You’ll notice that our interface is split. What you would like to do into a couple of main categories, or modules if you’d like.
First, you’re copying a site or site objects, I should say. What is a site object? Let’s say you’re migrating an entire site collection or multiple site collections at the same time, or you’re migrating list and libraries, or you’re migrating independent workflows by themselves, the terms store, the side columns, content types. The possibilities here and the granularity of what’s available is immense. That would be the copy site objects here at this point.
And then whenever you’re dealing with content itself, and you want to manipulate the content as you migrate it, like change some of the metadata, keep more details or less details of what you’re bringing there, all of that is going to be available here, whether you’re copying from SharePoint content, to an existing list, or an existing document library, or you’re importing from a file share to SharePoint.
That’s right, you can bring your Share drive directly into a document library that has an entire form or workflow, and all of that will be automated. You can even set the workflow to already approved if you like. There’s a lot of flexibility here when you’re bringing Share drives into your SharePoint, both on-premises and Office 365.
All right. And then we have some export, and most importantly, both edit. Did you ever go to a document library, and you needed to start a workflow on 37 documents at the same time, but they are initiated, say manually, or triggered by a field change? Well, the bulk-edit metadata is going to allow to do just that. You connect to a list, you connect to a library, and you can edit any field unlike what’s possible in SharePoint on their edit list or quick edit mode or viewing data sheet view, whatever it’s called these days, this is really going to allow you to edit any field that you desire.
Then you can go ahead, and what we’re going to do is is we’re going to click on Copy Site Objects, and I want to explore going, say, from 2010 to 2013, or 2013 to 2013, since we’re talking about deployment. We’re talking about going from a test to QA to production. And of course, all of this works between versions seamlessly as well.
So I can select my site collection. I’ve got my credentials here, and click on Connect. I can choose a site for the source of where I want to copy from, and then I do the same thing for the destination. So I’ve got the destination ready for you guys right here. Click on Connect, and click on Next.
The way ShareGate works is it provides you with the source on the left, destination on the right, and on the far left, you’re going to get an easy way to filter…oh, my voice. I almost lost it there for second.
So you get, on the left-hand side, you get a filter that allows you to just choose what you want to look at for these two boxes on the left and on the right, whether it’s list, whether it’s sites or a site collections, whether it’s content types, whether it’s groups, security groups, Active Directory groups, permission levels and workflows, of course. So if you have site workflows, if you have Nintex sites or reusable workflows, you can definitely migrate that as well.
You can copy the manage metadata, the term store. You can drill down and see the terms sets within that term store. So there is a lot of possibilities, a lot of granularity, but you can do that in bulk as well. Needless to say, that while you’re migrating, while you’re copying, you may want to change some of the definitions of the objects that you’re copying.
You may want to copy the workflow on the sites, but you may want to turn the site from a team site into a blank site, from a blank site to a team site. So you’ll notice here, I have all the source site templates on the left-hand side, all the destination site templates on the right hand side. And here, you can easily map them.
So I can say, “Look…” Well, in 2013, there’s no more blank sites so that’s why it’s not showing up. But I can say, “You know what? if you see that somebody created a community site at the source, we’re going to go ahead and cancel that. And when we copy it to the destination, we’re going to turn that site into team site.” But the workflows are going to be kept, the forms are going to be kept. All of that is going to bring to the destination. But you can manipulate how you deploy those different environment, or those different objects between environments, rather.
We also have a migration simulation. So what we call a pre-migration check. For example, I want to copy this document library. Now, this document library comes with a workflow and a form. If I go check this out quickly, I’m going to go ahead and go to documents to approve. Now, there are documents to approve. If I look at the properties on one of these items, I’ll see that View Properties. We have a Nintex Form. Very basic, I know. And you’ve done some amazing things. I just got this going on, but at least I’ve got a form going on.
I can also look for the library and see that there is a Nintex Workflow here associated to this document library called document approval process or a probation, since we’re very French here. So I can click on the workflow, see that it’s doing a couple of things, it’s filtering on the specific user, it’s checking it out, it’s sending notifications to the created by, updating certain items. So that basic workflow, but I’ve got a workflow at the source. So I may want to copy that.
I also have a partner’s list here, I have a news list that we created earlier together. So when I click on New, it’s going to generate my form, and I can fill all of that out. So I’ve got a couple of things going on here. So, before I copy, say this, or I can click on and highlight the two things that I want to copy, unless I just want to copy these documents to approve library, before I actually click on Copy and go through all the things that I want to do while copying it, I can actually run a pre-check report.
So I can click on Pre-Check Report and answer the same questions, and click on Check. This is going to simulate the migration or the copy, I should say, since we’re just deploying from a testing environment to a QA or production environment at this point, right? We’re not doing a migration between versions of SharePoint. And that’s the beauty of ShareGate. We don’t charge by gigabytes, so it doesn’t matter how much you move, and between what you move it in between.
All right. And you can see that everything ran successfully. If my user didn’t exist at the destination, then they would give me, “Hey, you got to be watching out because you reference a user called Camille.” That reminds me of a stand-up comedy. I don’t know why I’m talking about Eddie Murphy right now. Camille! But we’ll skip that. I think it was “Delirious” or I could have been wrong. Not a 100%, but definitely something to watch if you’ve got some time tonight.
The pre-migration check is going to analyze the workflow, the list, the library, dependencies. What if your workflow references another list somewhere else? So that’s going to analyze everything and make sure that that migration is going to happen successfully.
So now that I know that the library copy with the workflow can happen, I can take it and all there is to it is a simple drag and drop. You select it. You can select multiple at a time if you feel pretty awesome. I’m just going to select this one for now. You click and hold, you drag and drop it, you bring it to the right-hand side. and you answer the questions.
You can rename the library, you can choose whether or not you want to bring the content, whether you want to limit the number of versions in the version history, whether you want to keep the custom permissions, whether you want to bring the workflows, both SharePoint designer workflows and Nintex Workflows. We also keep your Nintex workflow history.
If there’s features to be activated, we’ll activate them for you. So the beauty about this…do you know that to be able to use Nintex Workflows, you need to activate that Nintex Workflow features, as well the Nintex Forms features at the destination? Well, with this checkbox, you don’t have to worry about anything. We’ll go ahead and activate that feature for you.
Now, we’ll also bring your customized forms and views. What does that mean? Well, if you’ve created Nintex Forms, we’re going to bring them for you. But even better, not even better, also we’ll also bring any info path forms and views that you may have done. Any SharePoint designer views that you may have done, we’ll bring those as well. So think about it. If your workflow references or uses an info path forms, that’s going to get migrated. If you get a Nintex Forms task, it’s going to get migrated. Pretty awesome. Pretty awesome.
Let’s click on copy here, and let’s see what happens. What I didn’t talk to you about, I was talking about the map site templates earlier. Well, we also have the ability to map your permission levels. So as you migrate things like a document library, or you deploy them…
You’re going from testing to QA to production and permissions may change. You may want to say everyone that have full control, I’m going to change that to the custom permission level that we have at the destination. So that’s going to take care of that for you. We also have the ability to map users and groups.
So if a user had access, so let’s say this workflow references, I don’t know, Camille actually. The fun Camille we were talking about, you can replace Camille as you migrate. So every even in the workflow, if an action references Camille, you can replace that user with another user at the destination.
So let’s check it out. Let’s peek through it. Let’s go to the destination. We should see already, documents to approve starting to appear. So there it is. Now I’m not saying it’s all going to be copied already but we can see if we look, let’s see if they’ll form…I’m being an impatient person. My developers are like, “Come on, you’ve got to wait.” So the form has been migrated successfully. Do you see how easy that was, drag and drop.
If I go into that library and I click on Workflow at this point, management takes workflow. There’s my document, a probation workflow as well. If I go inside of it, I can see that everything is still there and the created by in all those items, those emails, those notifications, they’re all still there and intact. I just deployed a workflow between two environments by taking the library and dragging and dropping it again.
Hey, what if you make a modification here? That’s the whole point of deployment and the library already exists at the destination. What do we do? Well, you take the library, you copy it again. Let’s make a mapping of users and groups. Let’s find that Camille. I can never say Camille anymore because of that, right? I do believe it’s this user. We can highlight to see the user account name so I can actually validate. If I go to this other one here, I see that it’s another user.
So I’m just going to take this one and I’m going to say, “Look, if you see Camille at the source, replace that user with Benjamin, Benjamin. All right, there we go. Save. So if I take the same document library and copy it across, and this time I’m not going to bring the content. I think it will be a lot faster to just bring in…the features are already deployed I know that. Let’s just bring in the workflows.
In fact, I don’t even need the forms really. So let’s just merge the workflow to the destination. Let’s click on Copy and see what happens. Wow, ShareGate is smart enough to figure out that the library already exists at the destination. So you can merge into it and see what happens. Let’s click on Merge here. Technically, I would have probably run a pre-migration check.
By the way, everything that is done with ShareGate is recorded, is logged. You can always click on Show details. You can also click on Migration report, and this will show you everything that it has been doing. All the sessions you ran today or the last seven days. And you can also filter by date and time, date range and see. All right, let’s look at the last migration; let’s see what we’ve done. We’ve copied the Nintex Workflow, and we merged the workflow history, as well, to the destinations. So it tells me what’s been happening here.
So let’s close this, let’s go back. I’ve got to copy and replace certain items. So when you got to replace, you can choose. You can replace, you can skip, you can keep both and rename them, or you can copy it only if it’s newer. In this case, I’m going to do the same thing for everyone. I’m going to copy and replace that particular item. And let’s see what happens?
Let’s go back. All right, did I change anything? Yeah, I did change something. All right. So there is my destination. Now this is my destination. We’ll refresh it but we’ll see that it jumped to version two, great. We’ll open up the workflow, and by highlighting, and look at that. The user’s no longer Camille. It is now Benjamin Niaulin here. So using this, I was able to deploy a workflow, but change the person only in the workflow, since I didn’t copy the content as well, to map those properties as well. This is remarkable. This makes my life a lot easier.
If you didn’t know by the way, you could also go to home. And everything that we allow you to do in ShareGate, in terms of migrating, in terms of copying between environments, and testing, and QA, and production, you can script with PowerShell. You can schedule this. Wow, that’s right wow.
I’ll give you an example. Right here at ShareGate, we have a parent company that does a lot of consulting, that do us office services of course. So what they have done is that they’ve got environment, afford their customers. We have one on-premises as well for our developers.
Well, we do have an environment we’re testing QA production. And every week, we have a PowerShell script that takes what we have in production and copies it back into our staging environment but without the content. So that we have the latest workflow, the latest settings every week to run that staging, including Nintex Workflows, including Nintex Forms.
How are you doing this today? Just out of curiosity. Oh yeah, you’re muted. But just out of curiosity, how would you do this today to make sure that you waste the least amount of time, and run into the least amount of errors possible before it hits your users. This is very, very important. All right, so we’re closing migration report here. Which ShareGate was one is you can actually right-click or we can delete it. So I can delete this right over here and it’s gone.
So I’m going to be able to look at what else can I do? I can go into workflows, and I want to copy this site workflow, this Nintex site workflow. But before I do so, I’m going to go into my source SharePoint 2013. I’m going to go under site settings, Nintex managed site workflows. And under that, I can see that I have a document creation workflow available. If I click it, I’m going to see that this workflow at some point create…let’s double-click, let’s look at it. It creates an item in the library called documents to approve that we just migrated and then deleted.
Just to make sure that it’s been deleted, let’s go check out the destination, our production environment, and let’s make sure that there are no documents to approve library. Let’s check out the site contents. There is no documents to approve. So right now, what I can do is I can take my site workflow called document creation. Drag and drop it to my destination, my production environment or another site collection. And I can say, “Copy that site workflow” and click on Copy.
It’s going to take a while because what it’s doing right now is it’s analyzing everything that’s in the workflow, including the dependencies. This dependency is a document library with a lot of metadata, and it’s on the workflow as well. So then it’s going to analyze that workflow that’s in that document library.
Why am I telling you it’s going to be long? Because I want you to understand how awesome ShareGate is. You don’t have to worry about anything. So in front of us what we see is that the site workflow, this Nintex site workflow, has been copied. So the site, the Nintex site workflow has been copied successfully. But look at that, if I go under list and libraries, it copied the documents to approve. Let’s go check it out in my browser. I’m going to refresh the destination. If you don’t see video, the thing that you have to retain is that, well, ShareGate is awesome.
Now everything is working exactly as I expected here. If go to manage site workflow now at the destination, my workflow has been copied. My workflow has been copied. Actually the initiator has been changed because my mapping of users and groups has been saved, remember? So my site workflow has been copied. But if I go into my site content now, the documents to approve library has also been copied. The Nintex form that was attached to it has also been copied. The library workflow has also been copied.
Needless to say, some people tell us, “Oh, well, it’s easy.” It’s easy because ShareGate makes it looks easy. You have no idea the amount of things happening in the background, so that we copy your lookup columns in the right order. So that your terms stores, your terms are created in the term set. Set to opens the submission policy, create your terms, close it back. Add your workflows, add your forms, make sure everything works.
Look at the behind the scenes, rewrite the URLs so they fit at the destination because you’re going from testing to QA to production. Imagine that the URL to the image is still pointing to the testing environment image. That would be horrible, and that’s what ShareGate really makes that whole experience as pleasant and as easy as possible.
Of course this is the same experience if you’re on Office 365. Right now, I’m on my Office 365. You can see from SharePoint.com to SharePoint.com, and I can do the same thing. I can take a library, a list with a form and a workflow. I can copy it to the destination. Choose the same thing, and click on Copy, and I’m going to get that same experience at the destination for my Office 365 environment if you’ve migrated.
Let’s go back to our presentation here, and there’s so much more that I could cover. On our side, you’ll find tons of videos, and the academy’s full of them that’s going to show you what we can see. What do we support? If you want to copy, if you want to migrate or move between environments, we go ahead and support your SharePoint 2007 environment for Nintex Workflows and Forms. Your SharePoint 2010 environments, Spring Nintex and forms, your SharePoint 2013, your Office 365. Wherever you’ve put SharePoint and Nintex is working on it, we’ll bring it.
We’ve got a very nice FAQ that you can go ahead and visit. I do believe I saved it quickly that you can check it out. There is a lot of valuable information that tells you what is supported. So forms, workflows, everything is very well supported. There’s a lot of questions answered here. I’m going to talk actually, going from on-prem to Office 365. Let’s cover that because we often get that question actually.
What about going from on-premises to Office 365? Well, you should understand that in terms of SharePoint, whatever that concerns, everything will be flawless. There is no issues there with SharePoint Designer workflows, on-prem content, list, libraries, terms, versioning, content types. You name it you’ve got it.
Now in terms of Nintex, the Nintex Workflow product on-premises is very different in the Nintex Office 365 product. Why? Because in Office 365, it actually comes as an app, as an add-in. And on-premises, it’s really a feature solution within it. So what happens is that some of the workflow actions are very, very different from one to the other. So far we’ve been working at the Nintex office and everyday together, so that everything that is made available by Nintex is supported by ShareGate.
If it exists in Nintex and Office 365, your workflows that were created on-premises will seamlessly map and get created as an Office 365 Nintex Workflow. Nintex Forms are fully supported. There are no problem whatsoever. But you should know that until Nintex makes certain actions available like they were on-premises, you should definitely make sure that they work with the simulation or with the testing site collection before you do it. You could also contact Nintex to see when they’ll make those actions available on Office 365. But we’ve been talking to them, and believe me, they are aware and are adding them as fast as possible.
So what are the benefits of using ShareGate and Nintex together? Well, you get to leverage more Nintex and a lot faster. Because instead of rebuilding those Nintex Workflows to deploy them every time, and try to remap those lists and those libraries, you just got to drag and drop. That means you can have more lists, more sites, more libraries with those automated business processes faster. It has simplified your migration, your upgrade and your deployment experience. You can script them, you can schedule them, and you can make sure that a person that is not very technical can actually copy their sites as a template.
So imagine having a site that is not made for content but really as a template site for a project. That has the same workflows and the same forms that you can deploy multiple times every time there’s a new project.
And of course, the cost is minimal. That was one of the big factors in why Nintex and ShareGate brought themselves together in a partnership. So all in all, it will help you do what you need to do but even more. ShareGate allows you to do security management. It allows you to do reporting. Let’s check it out quickly in the few minutes that we have.
Don’t hesitate to ask us questions as well. Let’s open up ShareGate here, and see what we have. We had the explorer. The explorer allows me to click on something and get general information, as well as security information and actions. So I can drill down into a site or a site collection. I can see the list and libraries, documents to approve. I can click on general, and I can see all of the properties. When it was created, when it was last modified, are there custom permissions, how many items, what is the size of it, what is the permissions of it?
We can edit the list directly from here. We can drill down and look at the content types that are in this library. We can go ahead and click on Security. We can add permission, remove permission. If you click on Add permission, the tool is using the best practices, and allowing you to add them to existing groups, even if you selected multiple destinations.
So let’s check this out. Let’s see if we’ve selected this site collection and this site collection. We can go ahead and change some of these settings on the right hand side. There’s lots and lots of things that we can do here. We can add permissions. You’re going to see all the groups from all the sites here that we can add. They’re coming here. We can filter them so that I only add them to the members groups of these two sites and site collections. Which user do we want to add the permissions to remove them? We can copy the user permissions.
We are possibly the only way in SharePoint to easily, easily check the permissions. Did I say copy user permissions? Yeah, you can copy the user permission from one person to another. If your company asks you, “Hey, is this person just left the company? I want to know what they had access to before they quit because I’m worried a little bit. I need to check this.” You could come check permissions. You can run this on multiple forms, on testing QA production at the same time. You’ll see that. You can even run an external sharing report to make sure that nothing has been shared externally.
Why am I talking to you about this? All of this comes as part of the package. This is ShareGate. It’s not just migration. It’s not just your Nintex Workflows and Forms deployment. It’s your security management as well. It’s your explorer, your inventory, your reporting, your permissions matrix report. All of these you can export them into an Excel. You can get a security check. You can see who are external users if there are any, if you’re on Office 365.
If you click on Reports, we’ve added some pre-built built-in reports such as look at the external users, documents with explicit permissions, documents with custom permissions. Orphan users disabled in Active Directory, lists and libraries that nobody has modified in the last six months. An inventory of my site collections. I select my form, run, it’s already finished. And I can go back, and I can change the columns that appear here. So I can have even more when I export them into Excel to create those charts, to create those reports that I’m going to hand in to my manager in a couple of weeks or months. So you can also click on Find and build your own report if you’d like.
I want to find all of the sites and then you add your filters. Sites that are using a master page that contains Seattle.Master, because we’re not supposed to use those anymore. Sorry, call still popup there. Seattle.Master, and when I find these sites, I want to add all of that information in my report that I generate. Truly ShareGate is a very, very powerful tool. Remember that first or those first couple of slides? Let me go back up quickly. When you get SharePoint, it makes sense. It’s SharePoint plus ShareGate plus Nintex.
It’s a package deal that makes sense. It will allow you to benefit from the most out of your SharePoint, and do a lot more with your SharePoint. Stay in control, deploy easily, don’t have to necessarily run some PowerShell scripts. Although if you want, you can, but overall it is a lot easier for me to run and manage my form now.
So thank you very much for your time. We’re going to stick around for more questions. If you’d had issues, and I saw some of you had issues with the screen. We have a very high quality recording coming up your way in a day or two once we get that flawlessly up on the website. You’ll get an email with all the details. So no worries there. We also have an e-book that you can get on ShareGate.com/support. If you scroll down, you’ll see that amongst the thousands of e-books, there’s one on Nintex, and the deployment with ShareGate that will make that experience a lot easier.
Folks, thank you so much. The whole team here at ShareGate is super happy that you’ve taken the time. We appreciate it and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate. If you want to take the trial, try out ShareGate, the trial is completely limitless. You can use all the features including Nintex deployments for forms, for workflows.
So go ahead and download the ShareGate trial. You go to Share-gate.com, you’ll see the trial download button. Try it out. Let us know what you think of it. It’s best to test it out. Give us feedback and we’ll always making ShareGate better. In fact, I think there’s an update every other week these days with lots of benefits added. So thank you again, and have an awesome day.
Move to Office 365 or SharePoint On-Premises with support for Nintex forms and workflows. Intuitive features help you prepare, execute, and validate your move, whether you’re migrating an entire environment or just a few lists.
