Nintex placeholder action

When migrating your Nintex workflows to Office 365, we need to convert your On-Premises Nintex actions to Office 365 actions. ShareGate Desktop supports many actions, but there are still some that ShareGate Desktop cannot convert (click here to see supported actions). When ShareGate Desktop encounters an action that it cannot convert, the action is replaced by a special placeholder action.

What is a placeholder action?

A placeholder action is basically an empty action. Instead of not copying the workflow, ShareGate Desktop will replace all unsupported actions with this action. This lets you get the structure of your workflow migrated even though some actions were not converted. You can easily determine what the action was at the source since the name of the placeholder action will be the name of the original action.

What to do after the migration?

When there is an unsupported action that ShareGate Desktop converts to a placeholder action, the workflow will only be saved at the destination and will not be published. To publish the workflow, you will first need to replace all the placeholder actions in the Nintex Workflow Designer. You can do so by checking the name of the placeholder action to see what the original action was, and choose the right Office 365 counterpart. Once you find the right action, delete the placeholder and replace it with the Office 365 action you need.

Repeat this process for all placeholder actions.

Once you have replaced all the placeholder actions, you can publish your workflow.

Show me pictures!

Here are some screenshots to make this easier:

Source workflow

This is a simple Nintex workflow on SharePoint 2013. This workflow contains supported and unsupported actions.

Workflow migrated to Office 365

Here is the migrated workflow.

Some actions were converted to their Office 365 counterpart and some other did not.

There are two actions with warning signs that look grayed out, these are the placeholder actions.

The name of the actions are the original action names - to help you chose it's Office 365 counterpart.

If you double click on a placeholder action, you will get a message telling you that this action is unavailable.

You cannot publish this workflow until all the placeholder actions are gone.

The Request approval action lost it's child action. Please see below for further information on this behavior.

Unsupported actions with children

If you have an unsupported action that has children, it will get converted to a placeholder action and it will lose its children.

This comes from deleting the action, since by deleting it you lose the children.