Low Code Automation & Nintex K2 Five Journey By Nintex MVP - Introduction to Nintex K2 Five and its 3 Core Modules - K2 Workspace, K2 Designer, K2 Management
Nintex K2 Five is a leading low code platform that enables process automation and application building via low code and citizen development. K2 consists of 3 main consoles. The K2 Workspace, K2 Designer and K2 Management.
K2 Workspace is the landing hub of the platform. It is the transit area which a user may use to navigate to the other 2 modules of K2 mentioned above. It also acts as a user’s dashboard, where users may view their inbox for tasks pending their action, links to forms they had created, reports of their process usage and a link to the App store which they may use for downloading apps built by other members of the community to incorporate them within their development process. The workspace may also be customized to specific corporate requirements.
K2 Designer is the heart of K2. It is where developers can start their practical automation journey. K2 Designer's landing page displays "Most recent used" Files and Folders for quick access to developers to pick up where they left off.
The Designers left pane is none other than a folder navigation panel similar to that of windows. The terminology for folders in K2 is referred to as "Categories". Within categories, developers would be creating the objects they will need for using to build their process. The five K2 building blocks are “Service Objects”, "Smart Objects", "Smart Views", "Smart Forms" and "Workflow".
Service Instances/Objects: A service instance is a connection between the K2 application and an external system. As an example, an SQL service instance would allow K2 application to view and connect to the tables of the SQL database via a service object. The service object may be dragged into a smart object which can directly communicate with a view and form for reading and writing purposes.
Smart Objects: These are the objects that connect data from external data sources with your views and forms. They are the middle layer between the user interfaces (views and forms) and Database via Service Instances.
Smart Views: A view is a user interface and is commonly referred to as a section within a form that is used to load data from data sources or capture data from a user’s input to write data to a data source e.g. reading employees data from your ERP or capturing user input to write it to your SQL Table
Smart Form: A form is non other than a combination of smart views that can be used by a workflow. Example a "Leave Request Form". The form may contain a view for "Requestor Details", another for "Leave Request Details" and a third for "Approvers" which can be used for submission to obtain approvals before an employee can avail a leave.
Workflow: It is the engine to route forms between different task actioners. Example a workflow of approvers for approving a leave request. Workflow contains elements and logic to define the route a workflow instance would take.
These all will be explained in more details in the next articles to come.
The K2 Management Console is the admin console of K2, where an admin would create service instances to connect to external systems, track specific instances of workflow to debug any related errors, create roles and security groups to manage permissions, configure "Out of Office" statuses for corporate employees if they do not do so on their own when availing a leave, set workflow and server settings and other managerial activities
In the next article to come, will be deep diving into K2 Designer and its building blocks, functionalities and how to build them.
