What’s New: Connection Manager for SharePoint Online

A highly desired feature that has been available to on-premises users that allows them to store credentials for connector actions is now available for Office 365 customers.  Connection Manager for Nintex Workflow of Office 365 is now generally available. 

With security always a concern, Connection Manager is essential to implementing sophisticated workflow solutions without the need for storing usernames and passwords in each action.  This new capability:

• Designers to more easily meet organizational information security policies and standards
• Removes the need to update numerous actions in a workflow when a password changes
• Eases the workload designers having to know and manage credentials for other systems

For those who are unfamiliar with what Connection Manager is, hers is a quick review:  The Connection Manger is a component of Nintex Workflow for Office 365 that manages authentication for numerous SaaS platforms and services so that workflow designers will not have to worry about configuring actions with individual usernames and passwords.

Connection Manger also brings robust governance of data connections with the ability to define Personal and Shared Connections.

A Personal Connection is used when you are the only consumer and don’t need to share it with anyone else.  For example, when you are creating a connection with a high level of privilege like for connecting to an Office 365 Create site.

The only way you can create a Personal Connection is via the action configuration.  Any action created using the action is automatically personal, and once it’s created, it cannot be changed to a Shared Connection.  

By contrast, you would create a Shared Connection when you want to create a connection that can be shared with other workflow designers.  The connection can be shared among individual users, in a site, or across a site collection.  Share Connections can only be created by a site collection administrator or by a site owner.  

Connection Manager also provides a tighter level of governance by giving site collection administrators the ability to allow or prevent workflow designers to create new connections within the action.  Disabling this option means that only site collection administrators or site owners can connection and only via the connection gallery page.  You can access this setting via the cog in the workflow gallery. 

 
Administrator consent can be set up to required when workflow designers create connections. 

Now that Connection Manager for Office 365 has been released, what about your existing connections? Well, Nintex has that covered.  See here for a list of upgraded actions.   Existing actions containing username and passwords will continue to work as intended.  To upgrade the action to begin using the new Connections right away, just open the action and click the “Click here” link in the message bar at the top to “upgrade this action to use a Connection.”  When you do that, the action will be upgraded such that the Username and Password fields are replaced with a Connection option, and from here on you can start using connections.  Nintex has made it simple to upgrade actions within the workflow by checking the option “Apply connection to all [connection of a certain type]”

For more information about Nintex Connection Manager for Office 365, refer to this documentation