How Nintex solves Identity for its global community

Nintex helps commercial enterprises and government agencies around the world improve the way people work with easy and powerful process management and automation software solutions. Today more than 8,000+ organizations and hundreds of industry partners leverage Nintex’s process mapping, workflow automation, and RPA tools to accelerate digital transformation by successfully managing, automating, and optimizing business processes. 

Every enterprise organization operates with multiple systems in place, many of which involve sensitive information. Ensuring that the right people had access to the right resources meant implementing a complex authentication system. The challenge was figuring out how to set up their portals to meet those requirements. Partha Ray, senior business applications manager, pondered, “How do we validate whether a partner user has access to our portal and with what level of permission?” 

Ray knew that if Nintex was to support multiple portals and partners at once, it would need an optimized system for authentication. One that was automated to handle complex rule sets.

Eliminating the need to reauthenticate 

Nintex has four distinct portals: one each for customers, partners, internal, and learning management. Each portal requires unique authentication, which posed a problem for partners with access to more than one portal. Users had to reauthenticate to switch portals, which slowed workflow significantly. Ray’s vision was to eliminate this issue by implementing a Single Sign On (SSO) system across the four portals. 

He explained what this would look like in practice: “Let’s assume a Nintex Partner is on our Nintex Community site engaging with other process experts. If they want to quickly register a lead they should be able to single sign-on to Nintex Partner Central where leads are captured. The same experience should exist for a Nintex customer. Say a customer wants to participate in a training course and they're currently logged into Nintex Customer Central. The customer should be able to seamlessly jump into our learning management system, Nintex University, without further authentication."

SSO and Rules streamline authentication 

Nintex was looking for a seamless solution to handle their complex authentication requirements. They first set up an Okta Customer Identity Cloud, powered by Auth0, test environment which Ray estimates took “about a week.” Once fully implemented, the SSO portal and customizable Rules enabled Nintex to streamline and automate authentication for multiple partners across multiple portals.  

Integrating with Nintex’s CRM system enabled Ray and his team to automate authentication using Rules. As Ray explains: “One of the primary purposes of the rules is to make sure the person logging in has access to the right portals. And because all of that is stored within Salesforce, these rules trigger queries to Salesforce and get that information for us.” 

Nintex also used SSO to enhance the customer experience by eliminating the need for users to reauthenticate when they wanted to switch portals: “Our customers only need to remember one set of credentials, which should take them wherever they're entitled to go. We've been able to do that with Auth0 within one tenant pretty easily,” Ray said.

Offloading Identity allows Nintex to focus on core product 

The ability to offload authentication allowed the Nintex dev team to focus their resources on the core product, such as more functionality in the first release of the Customer Central portal. The ability to quickly turn around features and product improvements is critically important to serving the needs of the global Nintex community. 

Ray reflects on how Okta saved his team valuable time and resources: “I'm certain that if we had to manage our identities from the ground up, we would not have had the time to focus on the feature enhancements that we are quickly turning around for the business with a small and very agile dev team.” 

Looking ahead, they plan to implement additional Identity features across all portals, furthering the ease of use and time savings. “By deepening our partnership, Nintex IT won’t need to do anything when Okta puts through feature enhancements. They'll just be automatically applied, which means more time freed up for our people to work on features instead.” 

As a committed team of developers, delivering world-class portals to thousands of customers requires constant innovation. Okta provides Nintex the solution they need to make that happen.

About Customer

Nintex is the global standard for process management and automation. Today more than 8,000 public and private sector clients across 90 countries turn to the Nintex Platform to accelerate progress on their digital transformation journeys by quickly and easily managing, automating and optimizing business processes.