jEyLaBs
Expert Automation, Integration, Migration & Testing services for global K2 customers
Jey is a seasoned SharePoint consultant and a K2 Insider located in Melbourne, Australia. With over a decade of IT consulting experience, He founded jEyLaBs in early 2009. jEyLaBs is a K2 service provider partner focused on delivering process driven IT solutions using K2, SharePoint and related technologies. Jey is ex-K2 and has been working with K2 technology since early 2006. During the early years of SharePoint consulting he found K2 to be a great platform to deliver workflow to the masses through SharePoint. Now working through his teams in Australia and SriLanka, Jey and jEyLaBs help implement effective solutions to process problems.
Jey attended the second K2 Insider conference and the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas. Here's his take on #SPC09 podcast with Chris Geier.
Listen to this podcast where Jey talks about K2 at the MOSSIG workflow forum.
5 Tips to Accelerating Success with K2 Projects
At jEyLaBs, our daily routine mainly involves project delivery. We work on projects that apply technology such as K2 to solve serious business problems. This typically involves building apps to remove business process bottlenecks, reduce paper use, provide new ways to conduct business transactions and support executives to make precise business decisions.
Our projects have no choice but to succeed and increasingly the pressure is on us to help our customers succeed fast.
We have employed various techniques to help our K2 project delivery and perfected them over time. We dropped some outdated practices, we tuned many of the traditional software engineering practices to suit our needs and also created some drastically different ways of doing things.
I am very excited to share the following tips with you from our K2 project delivery play book. I am sure these will help your projects succeed.
Tip 1: Consistently apply an Agile approach
Agile is a given. But, of all the organisations employing an agile approach IT project delivery, only a small percentage actually do it right and do it consistently. Read More
K2 SmartForms 1.0.4 released
K2 just released an update to SmartForms with new features and enhancements.
· Control enhancements – Enhancements including support for date and time selection in the Calendar Control Picker and improved Control binding capabilities.
· Rules enhancements – Updates to existing rule actions including the Navigate to URL and Show Message actions as well as new rule search functionality.
· Designer enhancements – Improvements to the design experience including SmartObject binding enhancements, View settings enhancements and List View filter and search capabilities.
Check out the release notes and download the update here: K2 SmartForms 1.0.4
K2 updates SmartForms
Today K2 released an update to its smartforms with powerful new features and performance improvements.
Read all about it here and checkout the PDF control🙂
http://www.k2.com/blog/K2smartforms102_release
Here’s some useful doco:
http://help.k2.com/en/k2smartformspdf.aspx
Become a SmartWizard
K2 have just released 4.6.5 to customers. This version includes a number of new things including a SmartWizard framework.
SmartWizard gives us the ability to declaratively create wizards and add them to process designer tools. Smart Wizard framework makes it easy to put a nice customised UI in front of SmartObjects.
What does this mean for your organisation? The power of SmartObjects is now truly at the hands of your process designers.
You configure wizards that make the job of accessing backend systems much easier and now every process designer can take advantage of your wizard.
You can configure various wizards to achieve various things and you can make that configuration a reusable asset.
We used to code these wizards for our customers – no longer the case. You can do it yourself. You can make adoption of process automation much easier and faster.
Welcome to 4.6.5 – You are now a SmartWizard.
Want to learn more? We are just an email away. (sales@jeylabs.com.au)
The revolution has begun – K2Forms beta is open
At 1 am this morning I was on an all important call with K2. There were 78 other participants. Renier and Codi launched the K2Forms beta and soon after that I grabbed the bits of the beta software.
You can get the latest K2 update KB1370…
You can get the latest K2 update KB1370 now. Feature Highlights are:
· The ability to run a K2 Designer for SharePoint process designed in one environment in another environment without modification
· Multiple enhancements to K2 Services and SmartObject Services, including filtering
· Support for using different versions of InfoPath forms for different versions of a K2 Designer for SharePoint process
Download it from the Customer Portal.
K2 recently released update 1350 KB1350 It provides…
K2 recently released update 1350(KB1350). It provides support for Internet Explorer 9 and the latest service packs for Windows 7 (SP1), VS.NET 2010 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 R2 (SP1). You can download it from the customer Portal.
How are you Managing your IT environments?
Just like most of the Developers out there, I am comfortable with solutions being developed in development environments, tested in test environments and then eventually moved to production for end users.
But, I am seeing this practice challenged more often than less in the recent years. Many customers dont want to have these multiple environments in place for many reasons – effort, cost, etc. I have worked on projects where there was only a single production environment. I have also worked on projects with up to 7 different environments – PoC/Demo, Dev, Test, UAT, Staging, Prod and DR.
The advances in Software and Hardware Virtualisation is helping with creating and managing various environments for development, staging, DR, etc relatively easy and cost effective to some extent. Cloud is seen everywhere these days and it is also making the expectation of having an always on infrastrucutre, cheap and resilient to become a reality in many cases. For those who can use Cloud, it will make creating multiple environments easy.
Regardless of the lesser cost, I also think that high use of Cloud will Read More
1230 rocks
I finished a complete install of a K2 load balanced distributed production clusters integrated with SharePoint farm, a staging and a dev environment update this week. The 1230 installer was awesome.
While everyone is excited about the cool new viewflow (which is really cool) I think the installer team should be congratulated for making my life easier – cheers!!🙂
K2 blackpoint and SharePoint Designer based workflows
Recently, my team has been working on a SharePoint project. As part of the brief we also have to fixup a few workflows that are behaving badly. We looked at the problem and it was a list that had couple of SharePoint designer based workflows attached for doing item updates and email notifications based on changes happening to the list items. One might think SPD can do it easily but, oh no, the requirement was to do date based checks on a regular basis along with reacting to the updates made to the list items. This needed time based loop and Date based calculations and other computations.
The guys spent ~two days trying to get this going and finally gave up. I think I can do this with blackpoint in couple of hours. Lesson: Choose the right tool for the right job. Just because it is free, dont kill yourself using it. Hope this is useful. Let me know if you had a similar or better experience with tools.
