Here's a preview of a few new features for blackpearl that we'll be releasing to beta in the next couple of weeks. If you are interested in participating in the beta for any of these components (as well as any future releases) please send an email to beta@k2.com and we'll get you signed up.

First off, let's talk about K2 Studio. This is our fourth design canvas for K2 blackpearl and provides a more office-like design environment for business users. This designer provides a drag-and-drop interface and provides a full set of design capabilities. K2 Studio is a standalone application installed on the client machine. While your business users can't crack open the WF schedules and start writing code from here (that's a good thing, right? J), they can do just about everything else that your developers can do in our Visual Studio environment.

Next up, K2 process portals. Back when I was a consultant working on K2 projects, virtually every customer asked me for the same thing – "Can you build a dashboard in SharePoint that shows me all the information I need about my K2 process?" The answer was usually yes, but that work had to be done manually and in some cases included writing some custom web parts. Well, this request was so popular and was heard from so many of our customers that we decided to build the functionality in to the product. With our process portal functionality you can create an area in your SharePoint environment that gives your users access to everything they might need for the process. Want to fix an instance of the process that's erroring? Your process portal can help. Need to modify permissions and add some people that can start a process instance? Get access to do that in the process portal. Need information about how many instances of the process were completed last month? No problem, take a look at the reports surfaced in the process portal. You can even access your tasklist from here if you want to. And, the really cool thing about this is that it's just a page that includes a set of web parts we've written so you can modify the page to add or remove any web parts you'd like.

The last thing I want to share with you is our integration with Office Communication Server. This functionality is obviously dependent on OCS being deployed in your environment, but if you do have it, this is something to take a look at. There's a couple of things that we're doing here. First, with our OCS integration, you'll now see the OCS availability pawn next to user information in our environment. For example, if you're looking for someone to delegate a task to, you'll be able to see their OCS status within our tools. Not only that, but you'll have the OCS context menu as well so you can potentially start an IM conversation with them right there.

Pretty cool, right? Even better is that we've added functionality that allows you to route tasks to users based on their OCS status. Maybe you have a critical task in your business process that requires immediate action. Instead of sending the task to an individual or group of people that is pre-defined, why not send to an individual or group of people based on whether they're active in Office Communicator? That way, you have a pretty good chance of getting someone to respond right away. This information is surfaced as a method in a SmartObject we're including so it can be used to build roles for use in any of your processes. Oh, and this IS real-time data, so K2 will always know the latest status of your users and will be able to act accordingly. There's lot of different scenarios you can use this functionality for, so this is definitely going to be worth checking out.

So that's it for this preview. As I mentioned, these components will be coming out in beta in the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye on K2 Underground and the K2 Customer/Partner Portal for more information. And, if you're interested in being part of the beta, don't forget to send an email to beta@k2.com.