Hi Jcamp,
1) Strongly recommended but not required that you create a quality assurance environment that would look the same as production.
2) K2 servers would run independent from each other, but various factors would determine how you should structure your environment to be readily available, redundant and scalable.
I strongly suggest you get hold of a business development manager in your region to assist you. Let me know if we can point you in the right direction.
Regards,
Gabriel
Hey Jcamp -- there are a few issues to consider for each specific case, but basically our product used to be licensed according to one of two models: per server or per user, more or less, although there were a few variants of the per user model including named users vs. seat licenses, etc.
Today, with the release of K2 blackpearl, K2 will be licensed per user, period. It's my understanding that this is a global move towards streamlining our licensing model.
The idea is you pay per user involved in the workflow, whether they design or participate, either way, they're a user. At that point, you can deploy as many servers as you need.
As per Gabriel's post, it does make a lot of sense to setup a robust QA environment to help support and maintain your applications in production.
Hopefully that answers your first question.
As for your second question, you may want to consider the following:
- does each functional area expect to own it's own workflows / sub-workflows?
- is there a centralized IT department that manages all of your business applications?
- do you expect business users to build and manage their own workflows with K2 blackpearl?
The point here being mainly that you may want to consider modelling your environment after your use of the platform itself. Centralized management of your business applications will be easier in a centralized, although perhaps load-balanced, environment. Distrubuted management may be enabled, even simplified, by distributed servers.
Gabriel and Sherif,
Thanks for the information. I agree that a robust QA envrionment is a must. I did not realize until now that the licensing can be done on a user basis. This helps greatly in my understanding of how to present my needs to my management.
Thanks again for the information.
