SharePoint Buzz

The more you use SharePoint, the more potential you see. I know because I’ve been working with it for years.

You see past simple collaboration. You see workflow, document routing and approval features. You envision drastic improvements to efficiency.

But as your vision take shape and your needs get more sophisticated you begin to realize that you can’t build what you want using SharePoint alone. Again, I know because I’ve been working with it for years. Grr.

SharePoint Designer will carry you to a point, but it’s complicated, and then you have to break out other tools, such as Visual Studio.

You want to:

• Create workflows that cross site boundaries
• Create processes that have advanced conditional routing
• Leverage out-of-the-box management and reporting capabilities
• Set up advanced, but necessary, rules and policies — to handle

K2 blackpoint
K2 blackpoint gives you tools to get past these hurdles, the obstacles that inevitably arise when trying to accomplish more advanced SharePoint workflows.   With K2 blackpoint organizations are able to build far more customizable, advanced, business centric workflows, quicker, easier, and easier to change. No delving into visual studio involving developers.  Add more business needed features like escalations, out of office and redirects.

Some important out of the box features include:

·         Visual and wizard driven interface.

·         Central task management through a single, rich worklist provides users with one place to check their daily work items

·         Delegation and redirection of tasks so users and managers can dynamically assign tasks based on need and special circumstances

·         Dynamic roles that can be based on SharePoint groups so a process can inherit the group structure already in place

·         Exposing of SharePoint list data as business entities, which allows data to be reused and repurposed for more than just SharePoint

·         Extensive management capabilities to control access, rights and process instances

·         Rich reports for business activity monitoring and process improvement

·         Access and integration with data or other systems outside SharePoint with web services integration.

One of the most important features/benefits to K2 blackpoint is how it makes developing processes, and making changes to them EASY.  This is accomplished by being visual and wizard driven. (No code) Wizards’ help you build and configure your process (list of event templates shown below)

Each wizard walks you through the creation of an event using easy to follow screens as shown below in the SharePoint Sites and workspaces event.   As you step through each wizard you select options and parameters without having to write any code at all.

An important component with rolling out any new technology or process is keeping your users habits and tools in mind.  With K2 blackpoint you can stay true to the interfaces you and your users know today, including MOSS, Microsoft Word, InfoPath, and Excel.    See below images to get a glimpse at how you can use the built in workflow options in MS word to participate in a K2 blackpoint workflow.

A popular choice of interfaces today is that of InfoPath.  With K2 blackpoint InfoPath integration you can build your form and easily integrate it with you processes as shown here.

Let’s go through and look at some of the ways K2 blackpoint helps you overcome limitations you may have experienced.

Site bound

 Sites are no longer an impassable barrier for any of your workflows using K2 blackpoint.  Documents and list items can be written to any list in any site in your farm.  As shown below documents can easily be uploaded, copied or moved from one site to another giving you the flexibility to take advantage of virtually any site structure.

Truly dynamic workflow paths

The path a process takes is often dynamic and quickly becomes more complex as processes are developed.  With K2 blackpoint you don’t have to worry. The sky is the limit as you can see from the below process maps each step in a process can be taken based on virtually any number of criteria either in the form or as part of any data within the process or external to it.  This advanced ability greatly aides in the quickness one can build processes and the agility a process has once deployed.

Another important feature that helps dramatically decrease time spent configuring and or maintain processes is the way in which K2 blackpoint interacts with the user/forms through the concept of “Actions and outcomes”

Actions and Outcomes allow processes to separate what decisions, or Actions, users are able to make from the implications, or Outcomes, of those Actions. Because Actions and Outcomes are defined outside of the form, maintenance of those decisions and routing logic is simple in K2. In short, Actions are the decisions that the user can make about the process step. Outcomes are K2’s way of taking the business decision and deciding where the process moves to next.

Based on the action chosen by the user, the outcome of the activity is decided by the K2 Server.

You can add new actions without reconfiguring the user interface or the line rules, greatly reducing the development time and maintenance of your process.

Actions and outcomes are defined within the properties of a client event. While actions remain part of the event, the outcomes are actually defined within the scope of the activity. So, when a user selects the action in the form, K2 evaluates that action against all of the outcome rules. And, based on the outcome of the activity, the lines are evaluated, and those line rules that are true are followed.

Process management and reporting

Finally what good would having all this power if you did not have good management and reporting on what’s going on.  With K2 blackpoint and the “process portal” You can get quick access to common tasks

Right from your process portal you can manage process instances, run reports, and manage process permissions and versions.

With the powerful management and reporting features get a quick glance at what processes you have deployed and which ones are running how many have stopped or are even in an error state.

Process portals allow you to handle processes versions seamlessly

From here you can see all active processes running, their respective versions, and number of deployed versions and have the ability to easily roll back to previous versions.

You also have the ability to visually report on information and details inside each process to gain added efficiency.

How can K2 blackpoint help you, what can you build?  Join me next time when we start to take a peek into some example solution examples of exactly what you can do with K2 blackpoint including more information on both process designers included in K2 blackpoint.  For more information on K2 blackpoint see www.k2.com/blackpoint

You can also check out the K2 YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/user/k2onk2

Chris Geier is a 15 year veteran of the IT industry, specializing in security and Microsoft product lines.  For the past 4 years he has been working in the workflow and BPM space at K2.  Also dabbling in community development and Social Media.