At the 2009 Microsoft SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, K2 announced our plans for integrating K2, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. For those of you who couldn’t make it to the conference or didn’t get a chance to see one of our sessions, below is a summary of our plans. For those of you that were able to attend the conference, a big thank you to everyone who took the time to visit us at the booth and in our sessions. We really enjoyed talking to all of you and getting your feedback!

K2 blackpearl, K2 blackpoint and SharePoint 2010

Approximately 60 – 90 days after the release of SharePoint 2010 RTM, K2 will be providing a set of K2 components for SharePoint that will support SharePoint 2010. These components will be available to both K2 blackpearl and K2 blackpoint customers and will allow you to create and run K2 blackpearl and K2 blackpoint processes and applications within a SharePoint 2010 environment. This update will also provide the K2 Designer for SharePoint in your SharePoint 2010 environment.

K2 and New SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Functionality

Outside of our support for existing K2 blackpearl and K2 blackpoint processes in the SharePoint 2010 environment, we’re working on new integration points that will come out in a future release of the K2 software. We don’t have release dates for this new functionality yet, but we do want to give you a peek at some of the things we’re working on. Read on for just a few of the things we’re looking into.

K2 and Business Connectivity Services

SharePoint 2010 includes an updated version of the Business Data Catalog, known as Business Connectivity Services (BCS). BCS provides read/write access to external data from line-of-business (LOB) systems, Web services, databases and other external systems within SharePoint 2010. K2 will make use of the new BCS functionality in the following ways:

• Use BCS to surface K2 workflow data in SharePoint
• Use BCS to surface K2 blackpearl and K2 connect data in SharePoint
• Access BCS data in K2 workflows, rules, forms, reports and via the K2 ADO.NET provider

K2 and Outlook 2010

Outlook 2010 provides more customization options to build custom solutions within the Outlook environment. K2 will use this extensibility to deploy the K2 worklist as an Outlook 2010 Solution, allowing users to action tasks from within Outlook. Below are a few screenshots of some of our R&D work around this solution.

Figure 1: The standard K2 worklist with the “Take to Outlook” icon

Figure 2: A K2 worklist item within Outlook 2010

K2 and the Office 2010 Backstage View

The Office 2010 client applications include a new view for functionality that was previously on the Office menu button. Things like saving, printing and options have all been moved to the Backstage View. K2 is looking at ways to take advantage of this new view and one of the things we’re investigating is showing the progress of a workflow that is associated to an individual Word document. In the screenshot below, you’ll see a preliminary example of how we’ll use the Backstage View to show workflow information for a Word document, in this example, an Expense Claim document going through an Approval process.

Figure 3: K2 workflow tab in the Office Backstage View for a Word document

Additional SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 Investments

In addition to what we’ve shown above, we’re working on several other integration areas. Below are a few of the areas we’re looking into:

• SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 integration
  • Enterprise Content Management including document sets, Excel services, Word services and conversion services
  • Records management and information policy
  • PerformancePoint for dashboards, KPI and analysis
  • SAP integration modeling
• For the Developer
  • .NET 4.0 integration
  • VS2010 integration (WF4, VSTO and TFS)
  • Claims-based Authentication

As you can see, K2 is busy with lots of great new functionality for the upcoming SharePoint 2010 release. We’ll keep you posted on our work as we progress into next year.

Until next time,

K2 Product Management Team