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How to Create an Outlook Appointment using Nintex Workflow 2010

Nintex Workflows 2010 is a great alternative to manually create workflows using Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer.Business users now have the ability to create some pretty intricate workflows directly from the browser.

The installation for Nintex Workflows 2010 is very simple, consisting mainly of deploying a solution file and activated a few features. There was however one issue in particular that took more time than anticipated to solve.In order to use the ‘Create Appointment’ workflow action, there are few configurations that must be completed first.

 
Create Appointment
 
 
Appointment Config

The ‘Create Appointment’ workflow action will call the exchange web service, pass in the credentials of a user that has write access to the target Outlook calendar, and add a new appointment to that calendar.

When I attempted to configure this, I was receiving an error in the SharePoint logs referring to “The root of the certificate chain is not a trusted root authority”.

You need to install the root certificates into ‘SharePoint Root Authority’.SharePoint out of the box only trusts its own self signed certificate called ‘local’.

Nintex support provided a good PowerShell command which will add all the root certificates on the local machines into SharePoint.

foreach ($cert in (Get-ChildItem cert:LocalMachineRoot)) { if (!$cert.HasPrivateKey) {New-SPTrustedRootAuthority -Name $cert.Thumbprint -Certificate $cert } }

The next step is to ensure the configurable user credentials (source user) have write access to the calendar that will have the appointment added to it.

This can be done in one of two ways. The first is to have the target user provide the source user with write access to their calendar.

 

The second is through the Exchange Management Shell.

The first command can be used to confirm the changes have taken place as it will list all users associated with the respected calendar along with their permission levels.

 
The following command will manually grant editor permission to a user.
 
 
You should now be able to use Nintex Workflow to add appointments to a user’s calendar.

Thoughts on “How to Create an Outlook Appointment using Nintex Workflow 2010”

  1. Thanks for the post. it really salvaged the rest of my day. its amazing that this isn’t really documented on Nintex or maybe its because I just can’t find it.

  2. Hi,
    thank you for this post. We are getting the following error: Failed to invoke Microsoft Exchange web service. The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized. What specific permissions do we need to give to the source user aside from the ones specified in the Calendar of the target user.
    Thanks

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Steven Mierop

As a Lead Technical Consultant at Perficient, I've had the pleasure of designing and delivering custom solutions on SharePoint 2007-2013. I have a strong passion for web application development and the .NET framework. Over the past three years, I have implemented a variety of SharePoint and .NET solutions for clients in a wide range of Industries such as Health Care, Insurance, Pharmaceutical, and Publishing.

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