A question was posed recently as to what the “Allow any user to finish this client event” checkbox means within a Client Event within K2 process designer within Visual Studio (for K2 blackpearl) and K2.net 2003 Studio.
The purpose of “Allow any user to finish this client event” goes back to at least K2.net 2003 (not sure about before that). In my experience this is a rarely used feature, but can be usefully under the correct business requirements.
By default (which means this is NOT checked for a client event), when a worklist item is attempted to be opened, K2 will validate that the person opening has rights to do so. If this field is checked, anyone with access to the serial number can potentially open it, because K2 will not validate the person opening the task against who it is assigned in the destination rule. The thing to keep in mind, that if this option is checked, you still need a Destination User(s); the task will only appear on the Destination User(s) worklist, emails notifications will only be sent to the destination users; however everyone has the physical ability open and action the task if they know the correct way to access it.
Below is a simplified example…
If we have an activity with a client event with this “Allow any user to finish this client event” option checked that targets John Smith as the destination, and we have email notifications turned on, when the process runs, it will create a worklist item for John Smith (as in it will appear in John’s worklist) and send John an email with the URL to the ASPX page in it. However, John could then forward someone else the email and that other person could click the link and action the item. If this option had not been checked John could certainly forward the email notification to someone, but when clicked that other person clicked the link in the email and opened the page, K2 would compare that person’s credentials against that of the targeted destinations for this worklist item. Since they would not match, K2 would not permit the task to be opened.
As mentioned, this isn’t used too frequently, but I have seen it going back to K2 2003 in certain situations where they wanted to assign a task to a primary user, but let potentially everyone action it (generally because they controlled other aspects of the UI).