Home : Products : K2 and SharePoint 2010
   
 
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Overview
 
 
Feature Highlights
 
  
 
K2 unlocks the power of SharePoint 2010

K2 supports all the latest SharePoint features, and it offers additional out-of-the-box capabilities that help organizations get faster and reach peak productivity sooner.

Our graphical tools eliminate code and make it easier to automate business processes around SharePoint lists, documents and sites. K2 can also be used to integrate SharePoint with other line-of-business systems for a powerful ECM platform that eliminates errors and provides valuable insight.

The bottom line: K2 offers the best software for workflow and BPM on SharePoint and the Microsoft platform.

Image SIMPLE, VISUAL TOOLS AND DESIGNERS
K2's three visual design interfaces are easy to learn and allow users of different technical backgrounds to collaborate on automating processes. Tools that allow you to build logic (rules and policies) into your processes without writing code will save time, and reusable components streamline solution building and maintenance of existing processes.
Image MORE FEATURES, BETTER PROCESSES
K2 tools, like the K2 Worklist and K2 Process Portal, simplify interactions with processes and make it easier to get work done quickly. K2 reports and management tools allow you to make continuous improvements to your processes after they've been developed to ensure your business is running efficiently.
Image ENFORCE GOVERNANCE
Keeping track of who has access to sensitive information or systems is an important part of many business processes. K2 lets you set up permissions for access to process data; and it provides an audit trail of all steps taken as part of the process, so you are always aware of who is making changes and what is being changed.
K2 and SharePoint - better together
Offering visual tools and powerful solutions that span all types of processes — from leave requests, to SharePoint site lifecycle management, to document approval, to insurance case management — K2 reduces workloads, improves efficiency and ensures that your organization is getting the most out of your SharePoint investment.
Features
Visual Designers Task Management
Deep SharePoint Integration Reporting and Auditing
Business Logic Administration and Process Management
Extensibility  

Visual Designers
Research shows that it's critical to have end-user involvement in process improvement. Business analysts, subject matter experts and IT developers can all make significant contributions to the creation and viability of a final solution. K2 understands the importance of collaboration and provides design environments for all types of users, regardless of their technical expertise.
K2 Designer for SharePointWatch Video
Your team is using SharePoint to maintain all the product collateral being produced by your company, but you need a robust process for approving and publishing the content to the right place. With the K2 Designer for SharePoint, you have access to a Web-based environment that makes it easy to create a process that meets your needs.
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K2 Studio
Your company needs to build a centralized employee review solution that reaches across multiple systems to gather relevant employee data. With K2 Studio, a no-code, Office-like designer, you have the tools you need (like access to Web services) to build applications that pull information from your finance system and your HR database, without having to write code.
Extensibility
IT Asset Management is a major pain point in your company. K2 provides your developers with the ability to build business logic, as an Inline Function, for retrieving asset information from a custom inventory database, which can then be accessed by the analyst building an asset tracking system. Any K2 designer can be extended by adding domain-specific functions and/or workflow steps to the existing set of tools.

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Collaboration across the board
You need to provide your company's portfolio managers with greater control and a clear audit trail in the processes they use every day. K2 allows those portfolio managers to start building the process in K2 Designer for SharePoint and then hand it off to IT to complete the technical steps using K2 Studio or K2 Designer for Visual Studio.
K2 Designer for Visual Studio
Developers are more efficient when they have familiar tools to build their applications. K2 Designer for Visual Studio is a powerful extension to Visual Studio that provides access to wizards, business logic and routing capabilities needed to build K2 solutions, along with familiar Visual Studio capabilities, like source control and debugging tools.
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DEEP SHAREPOINT INTEGRATION
K2's deep integration with SharePoint allows you to build processes that use and manage virtually all aspects of your SharePoint environment, without having to write additional code.
Site Provisioning
The IT department is getting more site creation requests than they can handle on a daily basis. Using the K2 site provisioning capabilities, you can build a process that automates site creation and user management automatically with a full audit trail so the team can see exactly what's happening in the SharePoint environment.
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External Lists and Content Types
You've created a new list in SharePoint that displays all your employees' vacation information stored in an external list, but how do you update that data as part of your company's vacation request process? With K2, you can easily create, read and update external lists exposed in your SharePoint environment from any K2 process and surface any K2 data as a content type anywhere in your SharePoint site.
Documents and Document Sets
K2 takes full advantage of the new SharePoint 2010 features. Build solutions that manage multiple, related documents and work across SharePoint 2010 Document Sets and Folders. This capability is ideal for such processes as loan processing or case management - any solution that involves a large number of documents.

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List Integration
The account managers at your company need to keep track of customer projects as part of the customer onboarding process. With K2, the project tracking list is easily integrated into the process, even if a custom list template is being used.
Records Management
Your legal team is using SharePoint to maintain all the latest versions of your policy documents using a Records Management site, but need a process to handle the draft documents. With K2, you can build a process that handles document approvals and sends the completed document to the Records site when you're ready.
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Business Logic
Every organization has processes, like employee onboarding, that include unique business logic aimed at triggering chains of decision-making events. Managing these rules and policies within your processes can be difficult without the right tools. K2 understands the importance of business logic, so we give you a wide range of features to ensure the solutions you build solve your problems perfectly.
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Inline Functions for Business LogicWatch Video
When your manager gets that e-mail to approve your vaction request, she needs to know how many vacation days you have left, and the dates need to be formatted correctly so she knows you'll be gone March 10, not Oct. 3. K2 Inline Functions will perform calculations and text formatting as part of your process and can be saved for reuse, all without writing code.
Escalation and Redirection
Missing deadlines can prove costly. That new banner for your big tradeshow next month needs to be approved by the communications director who's on a month-long holiday. With K2-based solutions, deadlines are always met because the process can automatically send the pending task to another employee when no action has been taken.
Working Hours and Time Zone Capabilities
With K2, your employees can configure their working hours and the time zone they're in so that tasks can be routed to them during business hours instead of in the middle of the night. This is particularly useful in organizations that run 24-hour help desks, so that customer tickets can be routed to any available team member for quick resolution.
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Notifications
Use automatic notifications to make your process participants
aware of outstanding tasks, like expense approvals. Even better, the K2 Event Bus feature lets users set up customized notifications that are sent based on specific events, like when the price of materials drops to a certain level and it’s time to act.
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Excel and Word Inline Functions
K2 continues to invest in powerful Inline Functions that deliver a whole new level of capabilities for the enterprise. Companies that deal with ever-changing policies and legislation often keep critical data and calculations in Office documents. K2 lets you maintain your business logic in existing Word documents and Excel spreadsheets and then use that information as part of the business logic or to simply provide information to your end users.
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Extensibility
Information is at the center of every business, and it's typically stored across various systems - CRM, SAP and Salesforce.com, to mention a few. Integration with these systems often requires a developer or someone familiar with the underlying system to retrieve the appropriate information, which is expensive and time-consuming. K2 provides world-class tools to pull everything together, without having to invest in lengthy custom development cycles.
Active Directory and ExchangeWatch Video
K2 gives you the tools to integrate your processes with Active Directory and Exchange, so you can automate the setup of user accounts and e-mail boxes, update line-of-business systems in real-time, and keep track of tasks assigned to departments across your organization.
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Meeting SchedulerWatch Video
Stop the back and forth of meeting requests. Use K2 to find available meeting slots for everyone involved, and automatically send meeting requests based on the best available time. It goes right to their Outlook calendar. You can include this in any K2 process.
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
K2's brand new integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM means users can build workflows and process-driven applications across their customer sales, services and marketing information investments.
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Access to SQL Data
Automatically generate K2 SmartObjects based on SQL tables, stored procedures or views. This powerful enhanced feature allows you to create a process that will automatically suggest related K2 articles when your customers open a support ticket, for example. Fewer support calls, happier customers.
Web Services for Workflow
Start and interact with K2 processes using K2's new Web Services and Windows Communication Foundation services. Use K2 Web Services for Workflow to start K2 processes based on events or triggers from line-of-business applications.
Web services for SmartObjects
Build applications that interact with K2 SmartObjects and SmartObject data using K2's new Windows Communication Foundation services and RESTful service formats such as XML, JSON, or OData-compatible ATOM feeds. K2 Web Services for SmartObjects are automatically and dynamically created for SmartObjects.
K2 SmartObjects and LOB integration
A K2-based expense claim solution can work across multiple systems — SharePoint (for managing receipts) and payroll (to reimburse expenses in a timely manner) — while providing a detailed set of reports for managers to track expenses over a period of time and across departments. K2 SmartObjects, a groundbreaking K2 feature, bring together information from multiple line-of-business systems and make it available to forms, reports and workflows.
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Task Management
Your employees want a clear view of what needs to be done and when it needs to be completed. They want tasks that are easy to access and act upon, and they don't want to learn new, complicated systems. K2 has the answer.
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Task Central — The K2 Worklist
It's easier to keep track of everything if it's all in one place. The K2 Worklist provides users with a single view of all their assigned tasks, across all processes in the K2 environment. Users can modify and complete these tasks directly from the Worklist — a personalized to-do list, only better.
K2 Process Web Parts
The help desk just told you they can't find the ticket you submitted almost six weeks ago, and you'll have to resubmit the request. With K2's improved process web parts you can see exactly when you submitted the ticket and who it's currently assigned to - no resubmission needed. K2 process web parts show you details of all process requests you've submitted and requests you're currently working on. The data can be filtered on criteria like submission date, process name and current status.
Integration with common form types
Your organization is ready to take the leap and move from paper-based processes to a more automated solution, but IT has standardized the use of Microsoft InfoPath for all electronic forms. No problem! K2 is flexible enough to allow its users to stick with a required form type and use it across all K2 applications. Then when your IT team changes to .NET-based forms, you'll seamlessly be able to update your processes to the new form type.
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Reporting and Auditing
All-around visibility is critical for every business. Making that information incredibly easy to access and understand is where K2 delivers professional-grade power.
K2 View FlowWatch Video
Your helpdesk system for new hires, terminations and transfers is working well; and you know this because K2 View Flow provides a graphical, real-time view into the status of your processes. For every action taken along the workflow path, audit information is available, so users know what decisions were made and who made them.
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Full visibility with K2 Process Portals
Your customer support system directly contributes to customer satisfaction and impacts renewed sales, so keeping turnaround time down is critical. K2 reports, available in the K2 Process Portal, provide process insight that allows you to determine the overall performance of the support department or a single individual. With K2 Process Portals and the sophisticated set of available reports, technical and non-technical employees can now benchmark people and workflows 24/7.
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Administration and Process Management
Manage and maintain your K2-based solutions in a familiar, comfortable environment like SharePoint or a web-based application. K2 administration is the gateway to managing and performing the everyday K2-based administrator tasks.
K2 Process Scheduler
With K2's process scheduler, recurring processes, like monthly sales forecasting, can be set to automatically start on the first Tuesday of each month, for example, ensuring that you'll never miss a deadline again.
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Administrative process approval
The marketing team at your business has created a new process to approve and manage content published to your company's public Web site, but instead of updating the content, the process is set to delete everything. Luckily, with K2's administrative process approval functionality, you'll catch the mistake and fix the problem before the process goes live and you're left with a Web site void of content. Feel comfortable letting business users create their own processes, knowing you'll have a chance to check them before they go live.
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Version management
You have implemented a new version of a K2-based solution to automate the delivery of Web- and print-based content, but unfortunately it contains an error. Luckily, with K2's version management, if a mistake is found in a process that has already been deployed, an administrator can easily move back to a previous version of the process until the error can be fixed and the process re-published.
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K2 Process Management tools
Your management team decided that all new customer onboarding requests need to be approved by a sales manager and the finance department. K2 gives you the tools to update a process with new requirements even after it has been deployed and is running in your production environment.
Flexible process and task security options
K2 provides the ability to set rights both at the process level as well as at the action-level so that sensitive tasks and information — like employee reviews and salary information — are only seen by the right people as part of a relevant process.
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