The non-profit migrates its forms built with the discontinued InfoPath, and upgrades SharePoint Designer workflows to Nintex.
Every year, thousands of people rely on Goodwill of Central and Coastal Virginia.
Since 1923, Goodwill of Central and Coastal Virginia (“GCCVA”) has provided job-training, employment placement services and other community-based programs or people who have face impediments entering the workforce. Whether jobseekers lack education or skills, have language barriers, physical or intellectual disabilities, or are facing major life transitions, Goodwill provides opportunities to transform their lives and helps thousands of people find work each year. Goodwill of Central and Coastal Virginia has five community employment centers, which help people find work and offer a wide variety of workforce training services, at no charge, across Central and Coastal Virginia.
The IT team at Goodwill of Central and Coastal Virginia (GCCVA) were heavy users of SharePoint 2010, using many InfoPath forms and SharePoint Designer workflows. Both tools presented significant limitations, especially when interacting with other line-of-business systems. Making it all work together required complicated custom development that often caused other problems. When it came time to migrate from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2019, they realized it was an opportunity to improve other aspects of their IT infrastructure.
Goodwill of Central and Coastal Virginia chose Nintex to replace InfoPath and SharePoint Designer Workflows. Leveraging Nintex for SharePoint has helped GCCVA’s IT team automate processes faster and more effectively than previously possible.
Migrating to SharePoint 2019 and an opportunity to upgrade
Goodwill’s IT department previously relied heavily on SharePoint workflows and InfoPath forms. Both tools presented significant limitations, especially when interacting with other line-of-business systems. Goodwill had built custom applications on top of SharePoint, using native SharePoint rules, controls, and webparts. The applications also required using a CodePlex list adapter to pull data out of SharePoint into a custom SQL database.
Reporting on SharePoint list data this way was complicated and often caused many problems. Upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2019 gave GCCVA the opportunity to find a better solution, as CodePlex adapters are no longer compatible with newer versions of SharePoint.
InfoPath was incredibly slow and difficult to use, especially for non-developers. The team found that if they tried to do anything complicated, they couldn’t do it using InfoPath. What’s more, since 90% of the forms used were client-based forms and not web-based forms, integration with Internet Explorer and InfoPath would break
periodically. Repeatedly running repairs for this created a real headache for the IT team. The ability to move data to SQL was a major requirement, but the team couldn’t do that with InfoPath. This coupled with InfoPath’s limited usability really restricted what they could achieve with SharePoint Designer.
Speeding up processes with no-code workflow
Goodwill of Central and Coastal Virginia chose Nintex to replace InfoPath and SharePoint Designer Workflows as they moved to SharePoint 2019. Since implementing Nintex, Erin and the IT team at GCCVA have automated various business processes by leveraging Nintex Workflows and Nintex Forms, including
creating a transactional solution to provide automated reporting for billing and metrics.
The organization’s billing reporting involves capturing a great deal of information, including case load, hours worked, hours requested, and authorized hours. Previously, program managers used multiple spreadsheets to track and capture all this data which were then manually created into reports in the form of
another spreadsheet.
“Like with anything that’s done manually, this creates other issues in the form of data validation, data entry, typos, and so on,” shares Erin. The result of all this back and forth meant the process itself often took 10 working days or more to be completed.
Leveraging Nintex and SQL Server Reporting Services, Erin and her IT team built a custom billing application to create a better process for everyone involved. The application features a modern, easy-to-use design on the front end that connects to a SQL database on the back end for records, data validations, and auditing.
Now, the 10 day or more process, takes just 3 to 5 days.
Supervisors can take action every day on this report. Daily validation is carried out via email and any instances of duplicated or missing data are automatically flagged. When it’s time to run the report for billing, all the information is already in place. Now, the program managers just glance through to check that everything is correct, before the finance team generates an invoice.
A modern solution empowering the Goodwill VA team
By making the switch from SharePoint Designer and Infopath to Nintex for forms and workflow, the IT team at GCCVA has found it much easier to deliver complete business-critical process automation solutions across the organization. Nintex helps the IT department at Goodwill manage, optimize, and automate key processes that power the organization forward. And with that help Goodwill employees are better positioned to provide the services that play such an important part in so many people’s lives.
