Symptoms

Question about Managed Users feature. As I understand it allows for a Manager to view the tasks of his users (managed users), and administer them. I also see that it works based on the ‘Manager’ field in the Active Directory.
Can you point me to documentation on how to set this up (apart from related k2 help section)?

 

Diagnoses

Managed users are determined by the User Manager. When enabled, it allows a managed user to see the list of names in his worklist that he is managing. It is also a view of that user’s worklist. Additionally out of office settings of managed user can be configured.

This functionality is based the User Manager user property and it has to be enabled before you can use it in K2.

K2 Workspace - Displaying the Worklist of Managed Users
http://help.k2.com/onlinehelp/K2blackpearl/UserGuide/current/webframe.html_Reference_-_Workspace_-_Managed_Users.html_tracksearch=managed users

Manager Configuration in K2 Workspace
http://help.k2.com/onlinehelp/K2blackpearl/UserGuide/current/webframe.html_Manager_Configuration.html_tracksearch="Managed Users feature"

There is no other official documentation on this functionality. I heard that some customers trying to implement customizations to do a task redirect for subordinates but I'm unable to provide you with any details on those customizations at they are not a part of OOB product feature set.

Some details on how "Manager" property for a user can be set in AD DS:

Normally AD DS administrators configuring all the user properties but rights can be granted in a very granular fashion for example to HR or other personnel to edit specific properties for specific users in AD DS. There is an official documentation from Microsoft on how to do it. Just to get an idea of how to delegate such rights in a granular fashion you can look at the following blog post:
https://dani3lr.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/delegation-control-to-modify-only-certain-user-attributes-part-1/

You can use PowerShell to check user's manager property value:

Import-Module ActiveDirectory
$user="John"
(get-aduser (get-aduser $user -Properties manager).manager).samaccountName

To list users for whom specified AD user is manager can be done with this PS command:

Get-ADUser -Identity Dennis -Properties directreports | Select-Object -ExpandProperty DirectReports
 

Resolution

See Diagnosis section.