Today I´ve been with a customer and ran into a problem using the “Update AD Account” activity. One scenario was to manage AD Accounts with the help of SharePoint Lists and Nintex Workflow. Anyways, it was necessary to maintain the “AccountExpirationDate” property of AD accounts. Unfortunately there´s no way to do that by default with [...]
Automate Twitter with Nintex Workflow – II
Posted By Markus on März 4th, 2010
This is the third part of my series on Twitter Automation with Nintex Workflow 2007. If you don´t know what I´m talking about, read the first two parts here
In this part I´ll create a list structure within SharePoint. Let´s recapture what I´m trying to do. When this is done I want to have a sort of a, let´s call it “marketing machine” which will find Twitter users that are “tweeting” about specific keywords. To find the right users we need something like a search list where we will store the hashtags (=keywords) we are looking for. I´ll create a list called “Twitter Search” and add some fields to manage the search behavior of the workflows.
Of course there´s a field “Hashtag”, additionally I added a field “Active” of type Boolean. I will use this field as a switch to tell a WF to ignore the hashtag on the next run. Remember that workflows will run scheduled and will never be started manually. To catch the users we find on Twitter I use another list, let´s name it “Following”.
This “Following” list serves as a target list for the search WF hosted in the “Twitter Search” list. The “Search WF” will create items here. There´s also a Boolean field “Following”, I´m using this as an indicator when the username has been added successfully to my Twitter followers. On this list there will be a WF to actually ADD users to my timeline, whereas the WF on the other list will only look them up. I want to split that process because otherwise it would not be possible to use different schedulings for search and add functionalities.
Last but not least I add another list called “Scheduling List”. This list will act as a controlling list, I´m going to define when and how often I want to run the Twitter search here.
You see I have 3 items in this list, each one is packed with a WF schedule. At this point you have to know that any WF schedule is bound to a single SharePoint item. I´m using the “Search Hashtags” item to schedule the search. If you want to look up for Twitter users once per hour, a schedule could look like this. You find the scheduling option in the context menu of the SharePoint item.
The scheduling for the other two listitems looks similar, the only difference is that I´m adding users every five hours. In the next part of this series, I´m going to describe the workflows in detail.
Cheers.
Markus
Tags: Nintex, SharePoint, Twitter, Workflow
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