K2 Designer

1. Saving a Form as a Draft: When using forms on your mobile device, you may need to save your work as a draft to resume later or work on the form while you're offline. A new SmartForm event, called Submit, allows you to submit instead of saving a form. When submitted, the form goes to the Outbox. See how to configure forms to enable the draft functionality in the How to configure Forms with Draft Functionality topic.
2. Server -Side Rule Execution:
   Use server-side rules in SmartForms to improve the performance and experience on load. Additional actions and conditions are available in the server-side rule execution, such as:
   Actions
   • SmartObject Interaction
   • Workflow Interaction
   • Control Interaction
   • View/Form Interaction
   • Rule Interaction
   • Data Transfer
   • Navigation
   Conditions
   • Custom Conditions
   • Error Handling
   • Workflow Conditions
   Context Browser
   • System Values
3. Form and View overlay opacity: You can now set the opacity of views and forms, allowing you to lighten overlays, for example when representing steps in a sequence, and hiding the flashing effect when navigating between steps. This setting is applied when the overlay is shown.
4. Browser support: Edge is supported for the K2 Designer, both runtime and design time.

K2 Workflow Designer

1. Conditional Start Rule: This rule allows you to specify conditions under which K2 workflows are started. You're able to create simple or complex rules to determine whether or not the workflow should start. When using a conditional start, if the conditions aren't met, the workflow instance is not created and the workflow doesn't run. This allows you to approach workflow design in a new way. Instead of having a workflow with complicated logic that determines which path to take, or which sub-workflow to call, you can simply add a condition at the beginning of the workflow that only runs when the start conditions are met. For example, you want a workflow to start on the initial check-in of a SharePoint document and not on subsequent check-ins, and configuring a conditional start rule is the perfect solution. See how to configure the Conditional start rule in the following How-To topics:
   • Use a SmartForm Reference to Conditionally Start a Workflow

   • Use a SharePoint References to Conditionally Start a Workflow

2. Warning Badge on Start Step: K2 is smart enough to assist you while you’re designing your workflows. The latest SmartAssist functionality prevents you from accidentally deploying a workflow when there is no form or event configured to start it.
3. Call Sub Workflow: Often a single item of work results in multiple tasks, for example, when an order request requires each line item to go through a separate review process before the order can be approved. This is now possible by starting multiple workflows from a parent workflow, where you can configure the parent workflow to wait for the sub workflows to complete before continuing, or you can set the parent workflow to continue after starting the sub workflows. See the following How-To topics on configuring a solution using the Call Sub Workflow step:
   • Create a workflow that contains a sub workflow that starts multiple instances
   • Create a workflow that contains a sub workflow that starts a single instance
4. Move Line Labels: Organizing your process on the design canvas makes it easy to follow the flow of the process, but it can be difficult to determine what a process is doing due to a complex design where lines and line labels overlap. You now have the ability to drag line labels away from their automatic positions and have that relative position saved with the workflow. View Flow reports also show the label in the correct relative location. In addition to this feature, if you want any moved label to return to its automatic position on the canvas, you can select the Auto Position Label option.
5. Customize From Address for Email Reminders: K2 has added the ability to override the default From account in Task Email reminders, in the Email step and in the Task Notification emails. This allows you to dynamically change the From account based on workflow content so that the task assignment, reminders and any other status emails can use the modified From address.

Security and Governance

1. Improve security in your environment by controlling who can delete SmartObjects, Views, and Forms in the K2 Designer. Grant Delete rights to people or roles in the Category node in K2 Management. This new right is part of the Authorization Framework that governs the security of your K2 artifacts. With the addition of this delete right, the delete option for SmartObject Security (K2 Management > Integration > SmartObject Security) is deprecated. For more information on the expected upgrade behavior change and required manual configuration, see KB0002667.
2. SmartObject Data Access: When securing your data using the Data Access Policy in K2 Management, you can view and manage permissions in the limited access section by user, role, and group. Or you can choose to secure it by individual record as in the past. You can also now extend the policy to associated SmartObjects, down to multiple levels.

Integration

1. SharePoint Service Instance: K2 is making it easier to use K2 with SharePoint by making several enhancements to the SharePoint service instance, allowing you to leverage the capabilities of the K2 and SharePoint integration without unnecessary rework and duplication of effort. In this enhancement the following parameters and methods are available:
   • The Site URL and List ID properties are available on all SharePoint list and library SmartObject methods. This means that you can use a single set of SmartObjects across matching SharePoint list and libraries. For example, given List A and List B share identical columns, you can use List A's Get List Items method to get a list of items from List B by specifying values for the Site URL and List ID paramters. For further information see the Using SharePoint Data topic.
   • Use the GetSharePointListFormsURL and SetSharePointListFormsURL methods of the system SharePoint.Integration.HelperMethods SmartObject to link K2 for SharePoint application SmartForms to matching SharePoint list and libraries. For further information see the Using SharePoint Forms and the Create a SmartForm to Link an Application's SmartForms to a Secondary List or Library topics.
   • Use the SharePoint Integration SmartObject methods to reuse a single K2 for SharePoint application workflow across multiple list and libraries without having to rework or redesign the workflow. For further information see the Using SharePoint Workflow and the Modify a Workflow to Link an Application's SmartForm Submitted Start Rule to a Secondary List or Library topics.
2. Salesforce Service Instance: Added functionality in the Salesforce Service instance supports integration with Salesforce Sandbox. This allows you to have a service instance for the Salesforce test (Sandbox) domain, the standard Salesforce domain (login.salesforce.com), and even custom domain environments. Use the new Login URL field on the Salesforce Feature Activation page in K2 Management to specify which domain you're connecting to.
3. Exchange Online Service Instance: You can now use the On Behalf of parameter of the Appointment and Task SmartObjects of the Exchange Online service to create appointments and tasks for specific people from workflows. A workflow impersonates the user of the email address defined in the On Behalf of parameter to execute the Create method. For further information see the How to create a Exchange Task Form topic.

K2 Workspace

Application Forms: Previously, you needed to mark a form as an Application Form and store the form in the Apps category for it to appear in the My Forms section in K2 Workspace. Now you only need to flag the form as an Application Form for it to appear in K2 Workspace.

K2 Management

1. Runaway Workflows: You can create a workflow policy in K2 Management to prevent workflows from starting a loop or recursively starting themselves in an uncontrolled manner, preventing performance degradation or system outages.
2. View Flow - Click to reports: Get deeper visibility into your processes with the View Flow click to reports enhancement. In the View Flow you can click a step which opens detailed reporting of that step in a new browser tab.

K2 Package and Deployment

1. Deployment Validation: When deploying SharePoint packages to another SharePoint list, library, or site, in the past you had to ensure that your list and libraries were identical. If they differed slightly by having, for example, an additional column, you could not deploy. This caused issues when deploying to lists or libraries containing additional columns/properties (sometimes even hidden), compared to the source list or library. The validation check on deployment is now less strict, making it possible to deploy K2 packages between environments. You can now deploy solutions to a list or library with more properties than the source list, but keep in mind that any extra columns in the target SharePoint list or library are ignored when the columns used by the solution are found. For more information see KB002528.
2. Deployment logging: Won't it be great to be able to troubleshoot or track K2 packages that have been deployed into an environment? Now you can with Deployment Logging. This feature provides summaries of deployed packages, and displays information such as the deployment date, status, duration and whether the package was analyzed or not. Deployment logging is made available through several stored procedures.