Stumbling Through: K2 blackpearl 090x (Part I)
Wow, it has been a while since I've posted anything. That isn't to say that I haven't been stumbling through things, quite the contrary, but I haven't been doing anything lately that hasn't been covered pretty extensively elsewhere... until now.
K2 has recently released a beta for its next major revision to the blackpearl product line, currently codenamed '090x'. This release adds tons of new features, many which will completely revolutionize the way that I have been designing workflows with the product.
One new feature that has already had a profound impact on my blackpearl experience is the ‘Configuration Analyzer’. This little tool runs after installing the product and looks for common configuration issues and even has an option to automatically repair the issue. The reason that this tool is so helpful is because there are a lot of other components involved with a complete K2 blackpearl installation, and each of these components has a boatload of configuration options that you, as the K2 installer, may not have configured yourself. It makes it very difficult at times to determine why a feature of the product isn’t working without going through reams of documentation and retracing all of your steps. Why not have the product itself tell you why it isn’t working? Sounds good in theory, let’s take a look at it in practice.
So in my particular scenario, I was taking advantage of the fact that K2 blackpearl 090x now supports Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, two products that I have had no previous experience with. Many of the items that K2 depends on weren’t in the same places I was used to finding them in Windows Server 2003 so I just installed K2 blackpearl 090x without setting up any dependencies and let it tell me what was wrong:
Ouch, that is a lot of big red ‘X’s, and there are a couple more when I scroll down. That can’t be good for any installation, though what can I expect without doing any of the leg work up front? So, how will I fix them? Will this analyzer fix them form me? We’ll tackle that in part II.