K2 blackpearl: Solve all your process needs — from the simple to the complex.
![K2 [blackpearl]](http://www.abesse.hu/wp-content/uploads/k2_pearl_overview.png "K2 blackpearl")
In today’s world, every organization is faced with the challenges of coping with processes, from the mundane (vacation requests) to the elaborate (company-wide invoices and claims processing). K2 is a leader in developing sophisticated yet easy-to-use tools that can help you solve any process challenge.
Features
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 SharePoint
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.
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.
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.
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.
Inline Functions for Business Logic
When your manager gets that e-mail to approve your vacation 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 RedirectionMissing 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 CapabilitiesWith K2, you can configure working hours and time zones so that tasks will not escalate in the middle of the night or on a company holiday. Saving you the embarassment of having to explain to the CFO why he received an email at 2am asking for an immediate approval of his secretary’s leave request. |
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.
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.
Integration and 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 Exchange
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.
Meeting Scheduler
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.
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 SmartObjectsBuild 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. |
Web Services for WorkflowStart 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. |
Deep SharePoint Integration
When you need a process to manage SharePoint site requests — or any SharePoint-based process — K2 is there to provide all the tools to create, manage and archive your sites. Users can build SharePoint-based solutions that interact with almost any SharePoint asset, including lists, external lists, documents, document sets, libraries, forms and site collections.
Document Management
The contracts department would like a process that automatically generates new customer contracts. With K2′s document management capabilities, you can create and update Word documents as well as generate PDFs automatically using information gathered as part of the process.
External access to K2 data and processesYour VP of sales wants a lead-management process that sends an automated e-mail to his staff as soon as a new lead is registered in Salesforce.com. K2 provides developer tools, like the K2 API and K2 ADO.NET Data provider, for building processes that start based on an action that occurs in a line-of-business system, like Salesforce.com. |
K2 SmartObjects and LOB integrationA 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. |
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.
Task Central – A 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.
Support for Mobile Devices
With the K2 mobile Task List, available for iPhone and Blackberry devices, rest assured that your critical leave request will be approved quickly, even when your manager is on a business trip.
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.
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 Report Designer
Your finance director wants to keep track of the average monthly total for all expense claims submitted each quarter, but the IT team is in the middle of a large project and can’t build the necessary reports. The K2 Report Designer is so easy to use, even non-technical users can build reports that filter data across systems and deliver precise, relevant information.
K2 View Flow
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.
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.
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.
Administrative process approval
The marketing team at your business has created a new process to approve and manage content published to your company’s Web site, but instead of updating the content, the process is set to delete everything. Luckily, with K2′s process approval functionality, you’ll catch the mistake and fix the problem before the process goes live. Feel comfortable letting business users create their own processes, knowing you’ll have a chance to check them before they go live.
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 or can completely remove the process until improvements are made.
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.
Multiple Authentication Methods
Whether you’re using Kerberos in your environment or not, K2 provides multiple authentication methods to ensure your users can access tasks and process information easily and efficiently, without a lot of additional configuration steps.
