K2 4.5 Quick Thoughts

bdougherty — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:54:42 GMT

I just finished attending a webcast on K2 4.5 and I thought I’d share a few quick thoughts.

Power User Story Improved

Given it is just a presentation and I haven’t actually played with it, the story seemed improved and more believable that real world power users would be able to define workflows in SharePoint. Power users who would be comfortable with Excel functions may be able to do some more worthwhile workflows since there is new support for inline functions and conditions. The new SilverLight K2 designer seems pretty user friendly, though the dialog windows can really stack up which may get confusing. I thought the neatest part was that the workflow can be defined just by starting with a SharePoint List’s settings which may be okay for some organizations and simpler workflows that don’t need to define the workflow and push it through lots of testing in different environments. The standalone K2 Studio is back. In K2 2003 it was required because Visual Studio integration didn’t exist. It’s back now for use by power users who need functionality up to the point of code. Not sure if this

Administration/Installation

Installation is supposed to be simplified, with unattended install and other details I didn’t catch. Install and configuration has always seemed daunting to me so anything to improve that is good. Related to that there is a new tool that is meant to help diagnose issues in your installation. That may include figuring out missing permissions or services that aren’t running. Also, now all K2 SharePoint features deployed as solutions.

Dynamic SQL Service Broker

Create a smart object to go against a table that you created, NOT the SmartBox. This seems promising and something that maybe should have been there all along.

Reference Event

Allows you to call functionally that you’ve referenced, in the sample showing it was calling a web service that was referenced. It seemed odd because it was really like writing code using dialogs (call constructor, set timeout, call web service method). Seemed a little odd to me.

Help

We were reminded that help.k2.com site is newish site that is supposed to be the MSDN of K2 for partners and customers.

VS 2010 Support

Still no hard date on this, but what we were told is approximately 90 days after VS 2010 is officially released.

SharePoint 2010 Workflow

bdougherty — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:17:34 GMT

One thing I wanted to get out of the SharePoint Conference 2009 is to see how much has been added to the built-in workflow and how it compares to capabilities of some of the external tools, K2 being the one I'm most familiar with. Whoops...the the K2 and Nintex sessions were scheduled at the same time as the SP workflow session...by accident?...a little friendly competition, maybe? (they did reschedule sessions)

So what is new with 2010:

Visual display of running workflow progress
Do not need to be tied to a tied to a list item
Site workflows - not just tied to a content type or list
Reusable declarative workflows can be designed
Import workflows from SharePoint Designer to Visual Studio
New actions (read/write to external lists, doc set and record mgmt, manager, user profile lookups)
Solution packaging (.wsp)
SharePoint Designer 2010

Ability to edit out of the box workflows (Copy or Modify, Example: logic for whether approver is needed or not)
data binding enhancements for including workflow data and specifying format
sort of straightforward UI for If/Then/Else targeted as business users
has the ribbon (it's everywhere now)
Impersonation control (run as workflow author instead of workflow initiator for access to resources)

Two-way import/export between Visio and SharePoint Designer
Task process customization (what to do when a task is assigned, pending, expires, deleted, completes)
Create custom declaritive activites in Visual Studio that you can then use in SharePoint Designer

So, while there are bunch of good improvements, there still seem to be limitations that keep the other workflow products and/or custom Visual Studio development:

Create non-declarative workflows (non-sequential state machines, looping) - seems like a pretty big deal
Custom forms or use of different forms at different points in the workflow (I think you have to use the same InfoPath form or list form throughout) - another big deal
As far as I can tell workflows are till tied to a site so no easy way to see all my tasks across sites
I'm still not sure what the versioning story is and need to get more understanding there
No statistics across workflows or view of all the running instances of a particular type
The SharePoint Designer is improved, but still kind of confusing - still need tech-savvy user in my opinion
Visio designer was ok for light-weight framing, but didn't add a ton of value and it looks like once you import it, you don't get to work with it in the visual display which seems like an odd experience

In a future post, I want to start comparing in a grid the different workflow options (SP2007, SP2010, blackpoint, blackpearl, Nintex, others) and the features they have and really understand which tools are right for different scenarios.

dougherty distilled : SharePoint 2010, Workflow

K2 4.5 Quick Thoughts

SharePoint 2010 Workflow