Symptoms

When running the AppDeployment.exe on the SharePoint 2013 server and entering any K2 URL (https://) and clicking on Test, it fails with the following error message:

Unable to connect to the K2 Environment with the given URL.

 

Diagnoses

We checked a few things, including the following:

- The signature hash for the SSL certificate used for the K2 site should be SHA1 or SHA256 and not MD5 - verified.
- You should be able to open the AutoDiscover URL from the SharePoint 2013 server (using any web browser) - this failed.
 

Resolution

We tried to open the following URL - https:///autodiscover/autodiscover and it failed. It should have opened/downloaded a JSON file containing all the K2 site bindings.

We checked IIS on the K2 server and saw the Authentication mode "ASP.NET Impersonation" was set to "Enabled" for the AutoDiscover app (under the K2 site). Once we disabled this and tried again, we could open that URL now and it worked.

On a side note, we also saw that "ASP.NET Impersonation" was enabled for a few of the other apps as well, we disabled it for all the other apps except "RuntimeServices" where it should stay enabled.

Once the above was done, the K2 app could be deployed to the App Catalog.