Brad’s October Cumulative Update

As it turns out… everybody needs a CU, not just the ole SharePoint! 🙂

While I may not have posted on my personal blog in a little while, I have been a busy beaver putting out some thought provoking content in other places. So, feel free to peruse the links below to those items (ranging from how-to’s to an analyst webinar on using workflow to improve customer experiences (CX) and even thoughts on the explosion of the cloud scene).

 

Migrating Lotus Notes Databases to SharePoint [Video]

Still using Lotus Notes? Interested in Migrating to SharePoint? Watch (Dean Virag) interview Brad Orluk to learn more about why companies are wanting to migrate away from Lotus Notes, obstacles in migrating form Lotus Notes, tools to help migrate, and so much more..

 

Linkin’ Tasks or How to Get That Pesky Task Item URL [Blog Post]

In this post I cover how to grab task details and surface them on an item level form during the execution of a Nintex workflow. It’s a handy trick that opens myriad possibilities around task management.

 

Cloud Computing: Past, Present and Future [Blog Post]

In this post I briefly cover the history of the #cloud, why it is so important and, interestingly, where’s it going.

 

Process Automation Tools Fuel Your Digital Transformation [Webinar]

Enterprises today have a common problem: a platform that slows down processes and disconnects line-of-business operators from IT. “It’s a platform that will eventually burn up around you,” Brad Orluk, technical evangelist at Nintex. Orluk made his comments during a recent CMSWire webinar sponsored by Nintex, “How Intelligent Workflows Power…

 

Omni-Channel Customer Experience: How to Drive Best-in-Class Results [Webinar]

Customer experience is rapidly becoming the primary source of differentiation in today’s economy. Businesses that truly understand their buyers and address their needs across multiple channels outpace competitors by a significant margin.

 

Final thoughts…

I’m planning on writing up a post in a few weeks on my thoughts around Microsoft Ignite and where I can see workflow, SharePoint, Office 365 and collaboration going, through the Microsoft lens, over the next year or so. Stay tuned!

 

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See you at SP Fest DC – April 27-29

I love Spring. Why you may ask? Is it because Western New York has finally begun to thaw? Nope, thanks to our friend El Niño we’ve been toasty all winter long! Maybe it’s because flowers are starting to bloom? What flowers? I don’t exactly have a green thumb. Okay, maybe it’s due to the loss of an hour of precious sleep? Definitely not. In fact, that is an absolutely horrible part of Spring in the United States…

It’s because it is that time of year again when many of my favorite tech conferences are held!  You’ve got Microsoft running the dev-centric Build (/b) in San Francisco as well as the C-suite focused Envision (I’ll be there as well so check back for a write up soon!) down in the Big Easy (aka New Orleans, LA).

But, another favorite conference of mine, SharePoint Fest (SPFest), is headed to a town many of you know an love (or despise?) Washington, DC!  The DC edition of this popular SharePoint conference draws many talented experts (such as my governance guru, Sue Hanley or fellow Montreal native and SP wizard Ben Niaulin) that will be sharing incredibly useful information that can help improve the quality of your SharePoint implementations.

The conference will be held in April at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

Plus, if you register with the code Orluk200 you’ll get $200 off the cost of a Gold or Platinum conference pass. Please note that while the company I work for, Nintex, is sponsoring, I receive no remuneration if you use this code so enjoy guilt free!

Oh and I’ll be presenting two sessions at the event:

WF 201 – SharePoint Adoption Broken? Learn how to fix it with Workflow and Forms
Workflow and Forms in SharePoint can be used to solve business and institutional challenges, particularly user and business adoption. As we attempt to implement these solutions by automating processes we are often presented with difficult decisions such as when to leverage out of the box functionality, adopt no-code solutions or develop custom applications. In this session we will discuss commonly encountered process problems and how to overcome them, the business need to support integration across platforms and how to address an ever expanding mobile workforce.

SOL 04 – Amazing Food & Drink. Faster. Anywhere.
Nintex Technical Evangelist, Brad Orluk, will show you how food and beverage companies New Belgium Brewing and Mitchell’s and Butlers, boosted productivity, decreased production errors, and reduced bottlenecks to bring you their great food and drink, faster!

Brad’s Interview on Technology Advice

I was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice’s Josh Bland, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders.

In this episode Josh and I discuss everything from business process automation to workflow and forms, my SharePoint ideas, to the upcoming SPTechCon 2015 August 24-27 in Boston, MA.

Below are a few highlights from our conversation:

TechnologyAdvice: How are businesses starting to automate more and more of what they do everyday?

Brad Orluk: When we talk about business process automation, virtually every type of business has a collection of various processes that make up what their business activities are. That may be production lines, assembly lines themselves, or research and development procurement. Virtually every type of horizontal on a business function can really benefit from automation. Think of HR and on-boarding offer letters, exchanging those back and forth, obtaining signatures, and dynamically generating an offer letter.

Those different types of things can be completely automated with our tool set very, very easily.

Obviously we don’t want to take the people out, because people have to approve these things. So approvals can be done with our product inside of their SharePoint infrastructure or it can be done even via mobile, because we have a discreet mobile app that tasks can be assigned to users while they’re on the go. So we’re really starting to bridge this space between virtually every environment.

TA: Does that include workflows and forms – you mentioned those earlier – do you see those as being part of that ecosystem of automation?

Orluk: Absolutely. Because at the end of the day, a solution — any kind of custom solution developed through Visual Studio as a standalone piece of software or something that lives inside of SharePoint — is but a collection of inputs and processing.

So really what we’re doing is building tool sets that everyone inside your business’ constituency can really extract the maximum value out of — whether they are a power user or a developer, they can all use easy drag and drop tools to build out these types of solutions.

TA: What are some challenges in this industry and how are you tackling them?

Orluk: There are myriad challenges out there in this space. And it’s everything from headcount to paying employees to build custom solutions, to the cost associated with developing those solutions themselves. The expertise is a challenge because this is a place that’s really changing very rapidly, so skill sets become obsolete very quickly. And again, driving adoption of what we’ve already invested in. So making sure that customers who have bought things like SharePoint or SharePoint Online are maximizing the investment they have in that space.

Our tools really allow you to maximize those investments because they help reduce the amount of effort that goes into building these types of solutions. So again, numerous challenges from the cost challenges to the time it takes, because everyone’s doing more with less. I think that we really enter in with a unique value proposition because we make it easy and quick, and again, appeal to a wide audience.

TA: On mobile phones, how is the interaction of workflow automation going to move on devices more so than just a desktop?

Orluk: At the end of the day our audiences are really very mobile, they all over the place, they’re connected to the Cloud, everyone’s computing in the palm of their hands with their smartphone. We’re trying to bring solutions that our users are building with our tools. We want to make sure that we have that in their hands; we have things like the ability to create custom mobile branded apps that will really integrate with solutions we built.

At the end of the day, what we’re finding is the hybrid scenario is really the future. Everybody must maintain some kind of sovereignty of their data with their internal datacenters. We are finding that for extranets, other types of solutions, and integration with other platforms, they need to be in the cloud.

So as time goes on, the lines between the on-prem and the cloud are going to become very, very blurred. We’re in a unique position because we offer solutions in both of those places that can leverage all of that functionality.

This podcast was created and published by TechnologyAdvice. Interview conducted by Josh Bland.