0807 Early Impressions
[Updated 2 Sep 2008]
Been trying out the betas of 0807 and I must say there are a couple of pleasing changes from 0803.
- K2 reports - improvement in performance overall due to moving the paging/filtering from the web server end to the database backend.
- K2 Workspace
- Archiving works seamlessly now. :)
- Create a blank database in SQL Server Management Console
- Go to the Archival node, specify the source database as K2ServerLog and the destination as the newly created DBs.
- Specify the To and From dates and then run the Archival! It's that simple.
- Permissions listing has been enhanced. Columns can now be sorted ascending or descending.
- Enhanced dialog for adding user/group permissions
- Workspace Node
- Additional setting for the workspace to control the display items per page for users.
- User Managers Node
- Additional setting to specify the limit for the number of users returned for the URM service. Default is 100.
- Additional place to add other trusted domains for users. -> No more fudging in the database.
- Additional options in the UI to resolve nested groups and also other AD query related settings. -> No more fudging in the database.
- K2 designer for Visual Studio
- Much improved memory usage - I was able to create up a process with 100+ activities and memory consumption was slight above 600MB. Nice!
- Wizards are also a lot zippier.
- Out of Office feature is now in
- The cool thing is that it uses the delegation feature. So the workitems can be seen on both your worklist and your delegate. You can even have a couple of people to be your delegate.
- Out of office settings can be managed by users directly from the worklist or by the administrator from the management console. Very nice!
- Installer has a number of improvements - The one I like is that it now creates the SPNs on the FQDN name of the K2 farm now. Nice!
- K2.net 2003 Interopt (going RTM in 0807) - My colleague DC has been testing out a bit for a migration project and there were a couple of issues since Build 002. However, it's pretty cool that in Build 010 most of the stuff is now working (even for K2.net 2003 VB processes). You can edit the Interopt Activity wizards to change the destination rules and also edit the Destination Queues from the "K2.net 2003 Destination Queue Property Wizard" on the Process Wizard Strip on the top of the canvas (though the editing code only made it into Build 011).
There's probably a ton of other fixes and enhancements as well but these are the more noticeable improvements just from playing around with it for a few days.