InfoPath Vs Nintex Forms Office 365

It's been a while since I posted something on my blog. I thought of a lot of subjects to discuss but the fact being that I'm a SharePoint consultant it should have something to do with SharePoint or Microsoft. BUT, I chose to go with Nintex. I'm going to talk about the experience I have/having with Nintex forms for Office 365. 

To make the story a little clear I'll start with a table of contents.

- Nintex Forms for Office 365 intro
- Why Nintex?
- The good the bad the ugly
- Conclusion

Nintex Forms for Office 365 intro

In October 2013 it was released to the SharePoint store to download. To get things starting a 30 day trial was available. It was a logic choice for Nintex to put this in the SharePoint store especially with Nintex workflow already being released a month earlier in the store.

Why Nintex?

I am a big fan of InfoPath. I really am. I thought the product had some great features which I used a lot. Especially the "Views" was one of my favorite features. I was able to put a form through a workflow and change the look and feel every time. Things like repeating groups, browser fill out, validation and workflow tasks are also possible in Nintex forms for Office 365. I think the picture below says a lot.
So Why Nintex? Well after hearing that Microsoft is retiring their InfoPath product I really had to find a solution for my clients. The most common names in Workflows and forms are by far K2 and Nintex so I decided to dive into Nintex the fact being that it's a little more "Simplistic". K2 is more mature and has a lot of great enterprise features but my clients don't have a SAP or a BMC Remedy, they mostly work in only Office 365 with a Dynamics CRM and Office 2013. Nintex can handle that very well.

The good and the bad

The good:

What I really liked about Nintex is the setup. Not much hassle just download it from the SharePoint store and obtain a license (or use the 30 day trial).

Click and go is always great in Nintex. You can do everything in the browser no need for local tools (InfoPath for example).

Multi platform support is great! With Nintex mobile available for the Windows phone store and IOS and later on for Android it's great to see how you can do everything from your own device.

Geolocations. I haven't really tested this yet but I seems really cool to be able to build a form and fill out the fields based on the geolocation of the device.

The bad:

You can really feel that this product is not finished, YET! Nintex set-up a site called http://nintex.uservoice.com/ for everyone to put in their ideas about the product and give suggestions. The funny thing is that a lot of people are not suggestion any (un-known) features but are asking for the on-premise features (for example: state machines and lazy aproval for Nintex Workflow).

As I mentioned before I am used to working with views in InfoPath. This is (not yet) possible in Nintex forms for Office 365. A work around could be to select each field and add an expression. But that just doesn't do it for me.

It's connected directly to SharePoint. Me as a SharePoint consultant shouldn't really bother about this but my clients could.

Conclusion

Nintex has set a great product in Office 365, sure it still has some rough edges and needs some polishing. Nintex is working hard on creating a better product everytime. The uservoice website shows that they are working hard on enhancing the product. The reaction time to twitter notifications or e-mails is also great. 

Keep up the good work Nintex!

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