Category: K2

K2 has released K2 Five 5.2, with a focus on making it even easier to build business solutions. Many new features have been added to every part of the K2 platform.

Special Notice to all Australia & New Zealand based K2 Customers.

Are you worried about having to carry the burden of this upgrade on your shoulders? Don’t worry. PowerToolz is here to help you. You can save on expensive consulting fees, avoid the pain of manual conversion and reduce the risk of things breaking after the upgrade.

We are offering a free upgrade assessment and special pricing on PowerToolz for K2 customers based in Australia and New Zealand. Contact us for a fixed price upgrade to K2 Five 5.2 (Offer ends 30 March 2019).

Also, take a look at our globally available K2 Assistance packages.

K2’s recent partnership with UiPath brings a new integration option to K2 with this release allowing customers to kick off Robotic Automation actions in UiPath from K2.

You can Download K2 Five 5.2 from the customer portal now.

jeylabs will be releasing updated versions of our
PowerToolz suite to fully support K2 Five 5.2 shortly.

PowerToolz 5.2 has been released with full support for K2 Five 5.2. PowerToolz Express will follow suit.

Here is a list of newly added K2 Five 5.2 features caught our attention:

K2 Designer
Save Form as a Draft: When working with forms on your mobile device, you may need to save your work as a draft to resume later or work on the form while you’re are offline. A new SmartForm event, called Submit, allows you to submit instead of saving a form. When submitted, the form goes to the Outbox.
Server side rule execution: Use server-side rules in SmartForms to improve the performance and experience on load. Additional actions and conditions are available in the server-side rule execution.

K2 Workflow Designer
Conditional Start Rule: This rule allows you to specify conditions under which K2 workflows are started. You’re able to create simple or complex rules to determine whether or not the workflow should start. When using a conditional start, if the conditions aren’t met, the workflow instance is not created and the workflow doesn’t run. This allows you to approach workflow design in a new way. Instead of having a workflow with the complicated logic that determines which path to take, or which sub-workflow to call, you can simply add a condition at the beginning of the workflow that only runs when the start conditions are met. For example, you want a workflow to start on the initial check-in of a SharePoint document and not on subsequent check-ins, and configuring a conditional start rule is the perfect solution.
Warning Badge on Start Step: The latest SmartAssist functionality prevents you from accidentally deploying a workflow when there is no form or event configured to start it.
Call Sub Workflow: Often a single item of work results in multiple tasks, for example, when an order request requires each line item to go through a separate review process before the order can be approved. This is now possible by starting multiple workflows from a parent workflow, where you can configure the parent workflow to wait for the sub workflows to complete before continuing, or you can set the parent workflow to continue after starting the sub workflows.

Workspace
Application Forms: previously, you needed to mark a form as an Application Form and store the form in the Apps category for it to appear in the My Forms section in K2 Workspace. Now you only need to flag the form as an Application Form for it to appear in K2 Workspace.

K2 Management
Runaway Workflows: You can create a workflow policy in K2 Management to prevent workflows from starting a loop or recursively starting themselves in an uncontrolled manner, preventing performance degradation or system outages.
View Flow – click to reports: provides deeper visibility into processes with the View Flow click to reports enhancement. In the ViewFlow you can click a step which opens detailed reporting of that step in a new browser tab

K2 Package & Deployment
Deployment Validation: When deploying SharePoint packages to another SharePoint list, library, or site, in the past you had to ensure that your list and libraries were identical. If they differed slightly by having, for example, an additional column, you could not deploy. This caused issues when deploying to lists or libraries containing additional columns/properties (sometimes even hidden), compared to the source list or library. The validation check on deployment is now less strict, making it possible to deploy K2 packages between environments. You can now deploy solutions to a list or library with more properties than the source list, but keep in mind that any extra columns in the target SharePoint list or library are ignored when the columns used by the solution are found.

Deployment Logging: Deployment logging helps to troubleshoot or track K2 packages that have been deployed into an environment. This feature provides summaries of deployed packages and displays information such as the deployment date, status, duration and whether the package was analysed or not.

jeylabs Team was in Bangkok recently showcasing our PowerToolz for K2 suite of products to K2 customers and partners. We are excited about the K2 Five 5.2 release and our tooling is here to help you move to K2 Five with confidence and ease.

Whether you are looking to setup automated regression test suites to ensure that your critical business apps continue to work as intended or you need help with converting workflows to the new K2 Five format or to You want to understand what your K2 environment actually looks like, our suite of tools are tailor made to help you just do that and achieve more from your K2 investments.

Our products are backed by our K2 centres of excellence. Check out our K2 assistance packages and reach out to us if you need any help at all with your K2 environment.