Nintex Forms 2013

Today, Nintex released Nintex Forms 2013.  The product, to support form design in SharePoint 2013.

You can find more information here: Nintex Forms

Whether you’ve used Nintex Forms 2010 or this is your first time seeing Nintex Forms, I think you’ll be quite impressed.  It looks very refined and seems to fit perfectly into the new SharePoint 2013 user interface design.

After reading the above details, make sure you click on the Get a Trial Now link.

Now the important thing.  When you get an email, there’s be a link to the Installation Guide.  Follow the steps in that guide and you won’t miss anything and everything will fine. I say this, because like most of you, I don’t generally read installation guides.  But, the installation and configuration of Nintex Forms is very quick and easy with only a few steps.  You might as well do it right the first time.

Installation and Configuration

This is just some obvious information which you won’t need if you follow the installation guide.

After running the NintexForms2013.exe, you’ll find it add a couple of solutions to SharePoint which you will need to deploy (if they aren’t already deployed).

To see this, navigate to Central Administration > System Settings > Manage Farm Solutions

Solution Management

Once the NintexForms2013.wsp solution is deployed, in Central Administation (quick links), you’ll see a new group called Nintex Forms Management.

Management

Licensing is your first port of call.  The licensing file is a file with a .NLF extension and it will be attached to the email you receive from Nintex after you submitted the Trial form.  Save the attached file to disk, and import it into the Licensing page.

Once that is complete, you can do the Manage Database section, and when configured correctly (I just had to leave with the default values), click on OK and it will create the database.

Feel free to look at the other options, but if you just want to try out Nintex Forms, you can leave them as is for now.

The next step, is to activate the Nintex Forms web-app feature for the web application you want to use it on. 

To get to this place, navigate to Central Administration > Manage Web Applications, click on your web application and select Manage Features from the ribbon.

WebApp Feature

There’s one final step.

Navigate to your site collection where you want to try this out.  Go to Site Settings > Site Collection Features.

Activate the “Nintex Forms Prerequisites Feature”, followed by the “Nintex Forms for SharePoint List Forms” feature.  You can activate the other Nintex Forms features, if thta’s what you’ll be needing.

Once this is done, you’ll now see a new button in the ribbon on your SharePoint lists.

Ribbon

Designing a Form

When you click on the Nintex Forms or the Customize the Item Form button, you’ll be given the form designer page, and it will figure out what fields you have on your current list and provide the appropriate controls for those.

Form Design

On the left, you’ll see a number of controls that are considered General controls.  But click on the SharePoint button or the “List Columns” button and you’ll more controls available there.

Final Thoughts

I hope everyone enjoys Nintex Forms.  One of the main things that hits me when installing something new, is how visually appealling and easy to use the installer is, and how quick it is.

This was fast, it explained what it was installing and the best part, it just worked.  No fiddling around.  The Installation Guide tells you exactly what you need to do.  Follow it and you should not have any issues.

Happy Form Designing in SharePoint 2013 with Nintex Forms 2013!!

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