Coming Soon!

Announcing K2 blackpoint

2008-06-03T11:39:00Z

Today we're announcing the latest addition to the K2 platform, K2 blackpoint. K2 blackpoint is for SharePoint users who want to build workflows and process-driven applications quickly. K2 blackpoint gives you these capabilities without the need to write any code. Many of the features in blackpoint will be familiar to you because you're used to using them in K2 blackpearl, but there are a few new features to be aware of.

With K2 blackpoint, we release our fourth design canvas, K2 Studio. K2 Studio provides the same easy to use, drag and click environment that all our other designers provide, this time in a familiar Office-style environment.

We're also including our Process Portals functionality, which you may be familiar with if you've checked out our Tech Preview. Process portals give you a one stop shop to view all important information about a process within a dashboard in your SharePoint environment. In K2 blackpoint, the process portal is where you'll manage all aspects of your process, including setting security rights and setting up roles to use within your processes.

One of the other enhancements we've made in K2 blackpoint is around the SmartObject creation capabilities for SharePoint lists and libraries. Previously, you could create SmartObjects off of your entire SharePoint site, but it was kind of an all or nothing deal. With K2 blackpoint, we've enhanced that functionality so that you can pick and choose what lists/libraries you want to create SmartObjects for which gives you a lot more flexibility in managing it. Oh, and one thing to note – with K2 blackpoint, SmartObjects created off of your SharePoint lists and libraries are the only SmartObjects you'll be able to use – we're not including a SmartObject designer to create other types of SmartObjects. That's what K2 blackpearl is for J

We've also included some process guides in K2 blackpoint to help you walk through creating your first couple of workflows. Our process guides include step-by-step instructions as well as video clips that walk you through each step.

So, there's a very brief preview of a couple of things you'll see in K2 blackpoint. You can find a whole list of features, comparison between k2 blackpoint, K2 blackpearl and SharePoint workflow, as well as pricing information on our site at http://blackpoint.k2.com

Coming soon to a K2 environment near you

2008-04-01T18:39:00Z

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.

64-bit and more released to beta

2008-03-21T04:58:00Z

Our next sneak peek involves a few new features for K2 blackpearl that were released to our beta participants today. Below is some info about each of the components that were released. If you're interested in being involved in the beta program for these or any other K2 components, please send an email to beta@k2.com.

64-bit support

We've updated our installer for K2 blackpearl to include support for installation on 64-bit Windows 2003 server as well as support for the following 64-bit components: SQL Server K2 databases, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, SharePoint 2007 (WSS/MOSS), K2 Server and K2 Workspace. 64-bit and 32-bit components can communicate with each other on the same network and the table below lists the scenarios in which this will be supported.

To From	64-bit K2 Server	64-bit SharePoint Server	64-bit SQL Databases	64-bit SQL Reporting Services	64-bit Clients (Visual Studio, Visio)
32-bit K2 Server	N/A	Supported	Supported	Supported	Not Supported
32-bit SharePoint Server	Supported	N/A	Supported	Supported	Not Supported
32-bit SQL Databases	Supported	Supported	N/A	Supported	Not Supported
32-bit SQL Reporting Services	Supported	Supported	Supported	N/A	Not Supported
32-bit Clients (Visual Studio, Visio)	Supported	Supported	Supported	Supported	N/A

Internationalization

Provides support for installing the English version of K2 blackpearl components on non-English operating systems. Note that this does not include K2 blackpearl versions that have been localized in languages other than English. Localization support will be in a future release.

Installer Enhancements

Updated installer for K2 blackpearl to support rich distributed enterprise configurations

Post SP1 patch rollups

All patches that have been released since SP1 will be included in the new installer

These components will be released to the public once the beta cycle is complete, so stay tuned to K2 underground and the K2 Customer/Partner portal for RTM release information. And, once again, if you're interested in participating in the beta program for these or other K2 components, please email us at beta@k2.com.

Sneak Peek at K2 [connect] for SAP

2008-03-19T05:09:00Z

Welcome to the K2 product preview blog, where you can get a sneak peek at new functionality coming from K2 before it's released to the public.

Today's post is about K2 connect for SAP, which was released to our beta participants today. This functionality provides a deep integration point between K2 and SAP that allows designers to build K2 service objects that surface SAP data for use in any process-driven application without having to write code. Service Objects built with K2 connect for SAP can be used to not only surface SAP data within your applications but can also update data directly in SAP that has been modified as part of any of your process applications.

Provided with K2 connect for SAP, the K2 Service Object Designer provides access to all available SAP business objects so that you can create a Service Object that can expose any SAP property or method

The K2 Service Object Designer provides an interface that allows a designer to select only the properties that they are interested in from the available columns surfaced from the SAP business object

In addition to the Service Object Designer, K2 connect for SAP provides an administration tool that allows you to manage all of the service objects that have been created.

For more information about K2 connect for SAP and to be notified when K2 connect for SAP is publicly available please register at www.k2.com/connect.