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Our company is getting ready to implement our first K2 Blackpearl solutions.  Unfortunately, the process we are automating is highly cross-functional so there are many roles and "trigger points" to manage.  It covers the order forecasting, contract maintenance, order entry, logistics, and service functions for specific types of orders, so not every order goes through, only about 10% of our total order volume.  I have reviewed some of the document on K2 Blackpearl's user and role management, but was hoping to get some feedback from those of you out there with experience on how to best guide our users in breaking up work for their areas.  Some are geography based, some are functional based, etc.  Pretty much all over the map.  I realize that K2 is very flexible, but it seems that the process design is highly dependent on the roles and work assignment methods.  We are a small organization, 300-400 total employees.  Maybe up to 20 K2 roles across all of our automating needs.  However, today the work that is geographic in nature (order processing) may not be in 2-3 months.  I am just tying to put options down on paper for our users to consider.  IT has proposed Active Directory (though we are using a VERY simple implementation of AD), AD groups, Destination Queues, roles in Sharepoint, etc.  Wow, almost too many to choose from!!!  So, if anyone has experiences, good or bad, on the most effective way to manage roles, that would be great.  

As you mention there are lots of options.  Generally, if there is a need to manage and/or uese these types of functional teams outside of K2, then I'd advise using AD Groups.  K2 can work well with AD groups.  If there is no need to reuse these groupings outside of K2, and/or you don't have control or want to impact AD with your team assignments then K2 roles can be a good way to go.  There are some other smaller advantages to AD group usage.  Currently K2 only leverages Roles for destination rules (e.g. workflow task assignment); AD groups can also be used here.  However, within the K2 management tooling and permission granting Roles are not able to be used, but AD groups are often able to be used.  Thus if you want to control things within K2 like SmartObject access or report permissions then AD groups currently provide better coverage here.


HTH.


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