Box and Nintex Integration

Now for those who have been using Nintex Workflow over the many years that it has been around, you would have noticed that there has been some Box connectivity.

On-prem – in the Nintex Workflow, you’ll find the Box actions available in the Live Catalog

Office 365 – you’ll find the Box action pack available in Store, in the Nintex Workflow Designer

Nintex Workflow Cloud – the Box actions had their own category available in the designer as well as capturing events (New File and New Folder).

Now, something new has arrived.  Nintex Workflow Cloud support, directly inside Box.  This is an amazing improved to Nintex Workflow Cloud and to Box, in that the two environments compliment each other so well.

If you are using Box or are looking into it, go and get a Dev Box environment – https://developer.box.com/ 

Once you have that, you’ll be able to add the Nintex Workflow Cloud app to your Box environment.

I found the easiest way is to go to : https://<myboxname>.app.box.com/apps

In the search, type in Nintex and you’ll find “Nintex Workflow for Box”.  Don’t worry about the others you’ll find there.  Add the “Nintex Workflow for Box” app to your environment.

This app is now installed, but to use it, you’ll need to configure a little bit.  Go back to your folder of documents in Box, and on one of your docs, click on the ellipsis (…) and select “Integrations”.  You’ll see a few in there, and the new one is “Nintex Workflow”.  When you click on that, it’ll ask you to allow your Nintex Workflow Cloud tenant.  You’ll need to type in your Nintex Workflow Cloud tenant name in there and authenticate.

Ok.  So we are done with that.  Now what?  Now it’s time to build a workflow that you will run from Box.

In your Nintex Workflow Cloud tenant, make sure you create a new Connection to your dev Box account.  

Then go to create a new Workflow, and click on the Start Event.  There’s an option for Box (which has been there for a while), but now there’s a new option – “Nintex Workflow for Box”.

You will need to select your connection, and which Folder this workflow should appear in.  You can not pick the Root folder, even though you might be putting files there.  It’s not currently supported.  So create a folder in Box and use that.   Finally, add a simple action to the workflow, like a Send an Email action, configure it and publish the workflow.

What you’ll find now, is that when you go back to Box, go to your folder and upload a document, you can now click on the ellipsis (…) on a document, select Integrations and Nintex Workflow.  The result is a popup which will show you all your workflows that you’ve built for that folder and you can click on “Run workflow”, to start an instance on that document.

The workflow has access to a property called “File path”.  You can then use that in the Box actions in Nintex Workflow Cloud, to get more information about the file.  eg. the Metadata.  That will result in directing your workflow to do different things, based on the metadata properties of that document.

You’ll find all the actions in the Box category, and the one to use is the “Get file metadata”.

Notice that there are other actions available to you, which cover the span of the work you’ll want to do with Nintex and Box at this stage.  Including, “Share file link”, which will create a link you can send in an email to share with other people.

I hope this gets you started with Box and Nintex together, to implement some really intelligent processes that you need to automate with this new integration.