K2 Five (5.2) Release Notes

  • 16 February 2021
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K2 Five (5.2) Release Notes

KB002606

PRODUCT
K2 Five 5.2

 

Introduction

K2 is proud to release K2 Five (5.2), our release that builds on K2 Five and focuses on making it easy to build solutions and use K2. Use these release notes to download the product, request a product key, and read about new features, including upgrade information and links to helpful resources about K2 Five (5.2).

 

 

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Download the installer from K2 Partner and Customer Portal.
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If you're upgrading from K2 4.7 you will need a new license key to install K2 Five (5.2). Get a license from K2 Partner and Customer Portal.
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Main Features

K2 Five (5.2) adds many new features that help you deliver powerful process automation across your business. Below are some of the main features added in K2 Five (5.2). For a detailed list of the features below and enhancements, please see What's New in K2 Five (5.2)

 

K2 Designer

  1. Saving a Form as a Draft: When using 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 offline. A new SmartForm event, called Submit, allows you to submit instead of saving a form. When submitted, the form goes to the Outbox. See how to configure forms to enable the draft functionality in the How to configure Forms with Draft Functionality topic.
  2. 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, such as:
    Actions
    • SmartObject Interaction
    • Workflow Interaction
    • Control Interaction
    • View/Form Interaction
    • Rule Interaction
    • Data Transfer
    • Navigation
    Conditions
    • Custom Conditions
    • Error Handling
    • Workflow Conditions
    Context Browser
    • System Values
  3. Form and View overlay opacity: You can now set the opacity of views and forms, allowing you to lighten overlays, for example when representing steps in a sequence, and hiding the flashing effect when navigating between steps. This setting is applied when the overlay is shown.
  4. Browser support: Edge is supported for the K2 Designer, both runtime and design time.
   
 

K2 Workflow Designer

  1. 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 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. See how to configure the Conditional start rule in the following How-To topics:
  2. Warning Badge on Start Step: K2 is smart enough to assist you while you’re designing your workflows. The latest SmartAssist functionality prevents you from accidentally deploying a workflow when there is no form or event configured to start it.
  3. 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. See the following How-To topics on configuring a solution using the Call Sub Workflow step:
  4. Move Line Labels: Organizing your process on the design canvas makes it easy to follow the flow of the process, but it can be difficult to determine what a process is doing due to a complex design where lines and line labels overlap. You now have the ability to drag line labels away from their automatic positions and have that relative position saved with the workflow. View Flow reports also show the label in the correct relative location. In addition to this feature, if you want any moved label to return to its automatic position on the canvas, you can select the Auto Position Label option.
  5. Customize From Address for Email Reminders: K2 has added the ability to override the default From account in Task Email reminders, in the Email step and in the Task Notification emails. This allows you to dynamically change the From account based on workflow content so that the task assignment, reminders and any other status emails can use the modified From address.
   
 

Security and Governance

  1. Improve security in your environment by controlling who can delete SmartObjects, Views, and Forms in the K2 Designer. Grant Delete rights to people or roles in the Category node in K2 Management. This new right is part of the Authorization Framework that governs the security of your K2 artifacts. With the addition of this delete right, the delete option for SmartObject Security (K2 Management > Integration > SmartObject Security) is deprecated. For more information on the expected upgrade behavior change and required manual configuration, see KB0002667.
  2. SmartObject Data Access: When securing your data using the Data Access Policy in K2 Management, you can view and manage permissions in the limited access section by user, role, and group. Or you can choose to secure it by individual record as in the past. You can also now extend the policy to associated SmartObjects, down to multiple levels.
   
 

Integration

  1. SharePoint Service Instance: K2 is making it easier to use K2 with SharePoint by making several enhancements to the SharePoint service instance, allowing you to leverage the capabilities of the K2 and SharePoint integration without unnecessary rework and duplication of effort. In this enhancement the following parameters and methods are available:
  2. Salesforce Service Instance: Added functionality in the Salesforce Service instance supports integration with Salesforce Sandbox. This allows you to have a service instance for the Salesforce test (Sandbox) domain, the standard Salesforce domain (login.salesforce.com), and even custom domain environments. Use the new Login URL field on the Salesforce Feature Activation page in K2 Management to specify which domain you're connecting to.
  3. Exchange Online Service Instance: You can now use the On Behalf of parameter of the Appointment and Task SmartObjects of the Exchange Online service to create appointments and tasks for specific people from workflows. A workflow impersonates the user of the email address defined in the On Behalf of parameter to execute the Create method. For further information see the How to create a Exchange Task Form topic.
   
 

K2 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

  1. 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.
  2. View Flow - Click to reports: Get deeper visibility into your processes with the View Flow click to reports enhancement. In the View Flow you can click a step which opens detailed reporting of that step in a new browser tab.
   
 

K2 Package and Deployment

  1. 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. For more information see KB002528.
  2. Deployment logging: Won't it be great to be able to troubleshoot or track K2 packages that have been deployed into an environment? Now you can with Deployment Logging. This feature provides summaries of deployed packages, and displays information such as the deployment date, status, duration and whether the package was analyzed or not. Deployment logging is made available through several stored procedures.

 

 

What you need to know when upgrading

  • You can upgrade to K2 Five (5.2) from both K2 4.7 and K2 Five (5.0 or 5.1).
  • You cannot upgrade directly from K2 4.7 to K2 5.2 if you have 4.7 installed on-premises with the K2 database in Azure SQL. In this case, you must first upgrade your K2 4.7 installation to K2 Five (5.0), then upgrade to K2 Five (5.1) and then to K2 Five (5.2).
  • When upgrading ensure your environment is fully functional and not in a broken state. For example, if you are on K2 Five (5.1) and run the repair or configure option from the installer and errors occur, or the option does not complete successfully, upgrading to a newer version will not fix the environment. Upgrade after fixing the issues in the current K2 environment.
  • The delete option in SmartObject Security (K2 Management>Integration>SmartObject Security) has been deprecated, for more information on the expected upgrade behavior change and manual configuration see KB0002667.
  • In this release access to the K2 Designer site is solely controlled by configuring rights using the Designer node in K2 Management. For more information on the change in behavior see KB002722 - K2 Designer rights changes in behavior.
  • Refer to KB002384 - Known issue: Value cannot be null Error Upgrading to K2 Five (5.1) before upgrading, if affected you must run a script to fix the error before continuing with the upgrade.
  • The K2 installer now blocks installations if your SQL Azure databases do not meet the minimum requirement. See the Compatibility and Support Matrix for the minimum supported version.
  • If you are upgrading from K2 4.7, read KB002045 for all the information on install changes, considerations, changes in the product, and how these affect your current environment.
  • Before upgrading to K2 Five (5.2) ensure all App artifacts in the category All Items/Apps/K2/Framework/Core including all child categories of the Core category are checked in. Failure to do so will result in a failed upgrade. See KB002419 for the resolution if you have already upgraded before checking in the artifacts.
  • If you are using K2 for SharePoint and upgrading from K2 4.7 there is an updated app available. You must upgrade the K2 for SharePoint app and re-run the K2 for SharePoint registration wizard.
  • If you are upgrading from K2 Five (5.0 or 5.1) and use the K2 for SharePoint app, do not run App Deployment only rerun the registration wizard after the upgrade.
  • As of K2 5.1, SharePoint Application Accelerators are no longer available. Existing applications based on SharePoint Application Accelerators continue to function, but the ability to deploy new applications based on these Accelerators has been removed and replaced with K2 Apps.
  • In K2 Five you had the ability to grant people API administrator rights allowing them to administer Workflow REST and OData APIs. The rights were configured in the API Administrators section in K2 Management> Integration> API Configuration. In K2 Five (5.1) the API Administrators rights are part of the Server Administrator and can no longer be separately configured. The API Administrators section in the K2 Management> Integration> API Configuration node is removed.
  • If you upgraded to K2 Five from K2 4.7 and had the Sort By SmartBox setting enabled in the Legacy Design tools, after upgrading to K2 Five (5.2) the selection will be disabled in the database and you need to manually enable the new SmartObject property index setting on the SmartObject.
     

Resolved Items in K2 Five (5.2) (5.0003.1000.2)

The following issue is addressed in the latest version of 5.2. See KB002875 - Invalid Roles Detected during Setup for more information.

 

 

Fix Packs

Fix Packs contain fixes for issues reported in K2 Five (5.2). K2 recommends that you test these Fix Packs before you deploy to a production environment. For a listing of fix packs for this version of K2 Five, see KB002760.

 

 

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