The client

The client is a worldwide manufacturer and provider of precision instruments for many applications in research and development, quality control, production, logistics, and retail.

Background

The company has more than 10,000 employees engaged in thousands of different projects. Departments have created an internal information and document management system for various projects based on Microsoft SharePoint, and they automate business processes via Nintex workflows.

This system consisted of several thousand internal company site collections and Nintex workflows that helped employees coordinate their daily activities and business processes. All information was stored on the company’s servers.

Objective

The client has decided to migrate its SharePoint 2016 platform to Microsoft 365 / SharePoint Online and move all processes related to Nintex workflows to the MS Power Platform. This task has been entrusted to Mitrix engineers.

• Some Nintex workflow functionality can’t be reproduced in PowerAutomate. We need to find workarounds to migrate Nintex State Machine to PowerAutomate.
• Several actions are not supported in PowerAutomate out of the box. We have implemented them with the help of trigger conditions.
• The project has a huge scope, comprising many sites and workflows.
• It was impossible to make exact project estimations and determine the scope of work. However, with the help of the implemented workflow, .NET discovery tool, and effective communication with workflows’ owners, we understood the total migration scope and were able to provide high-level estimations.
• Because some workflows’ owners had already left the company or moved to other departments, setting up the migration process was sometimes quite challenging. We have been constantly communicating with customer teams to find out the real needs/requirements of each team, arrange UAT, implement post-migration improvements, and organize training sessions.

Process

Our task is to migrate workflows from Nintex to PowerAutomate. Initially, discovering all workflows manually took a long time. Therefore, we have implemented a utility that extracts all workflows from MS SharePoint site collections and subsites and builds an MS Excel report. Then we check with each site owner to find out which workflows need to be migrated. After creating these workflows with the required set of actions in PowerAutomate, we send them to the customer for UAT.

Solutions

• Analysis of existing Nintex SharePoint solutions, new customer requirements, development estimations, elimination of defects, and production deployment.
• Migration of existing Nintex SharePoint solutions and development of new business process automation solutions based on Microsoft PowerAutomate, migration of InfoPath data entry forms to Microsoft PowerApps.
• Testing of the developed solutions by the customer, elimination of defects, delivery success, and production deployment.
• Support of the developed solutions, making changes according to the requirements/improvements from the customer during the post-production period.

Results

Most sites have already been migrated. We have received positive feedback from the customer stating that the workflows have been migrated successfully and that the new business processes are easier to use.

We continue to migrate workflows and provide support for the already developed solutions. We also consult users on MS SharePoint and Microsoft 365.

Technologies

no code, low code solution, MS PowerAutomate, MS PowerApps
.NET, REST API, JSON