K2's Future

  • 28 January 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 153 views

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Does K2 have a future?  I have not seen any significant new developments or features within K2 since they were purchased by Nintex.  Feels like they're just keeping it operational with no eye to the future.

 

Thoughts?


4 replies

Userlevel 3
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Thanks for reaching out! I'm the Product Manager for K2 and I can assure you that Nintex is fully invested in K2. In the little over a year since Nintex acquired K2, we’ve had three product releases, two for K2 Cloud and one for K2 Five, which is the same release cadence we had before the acquisition. We’ve added the brand new Style Profile feature, to allow designers to set colors once and have it affect all controls on a Form, added workflow error handling workflows and PowerShell support to create packages to K2 Five, and spent a lot of time cleaning up old code paths and investing in technical debt and security features, to keep K2 in line with Nintex policies and procedures. 


 


K2 is part of the Nintex product portfolio with several engineering teams who are committed to continuing the investment in the K2 product lines. Looking to the future, we are adding additional integration points with the rest of the Nintex product portfolio to allow our customers to solve even more business process automation challenges. Watch for integrations with RPA, DocGen and AssureSign. And setting colors in Style Profiles was just the beginning, we’ll add more capabilities to this exciting feature over time.


 


In short, while the product roadmap did change after the acquisition, we are working collaboratively with our customers to ensure continued success with their investment in automation technologies for K2 and across the Nintex Platform. As previously announced, we are currently working on a combined platform that will bring together Nintex Workflow Cloud and Nintex K2 Cloud into a single, best-of-breed solution. Nintex K2 Cloud remains fully supported and will continue to be fully supported for the next several years. While I don’t have information to share today on exactly what the path to Nintex Workflow Cloud looks like, we will never leave you without a clear path forward and will be sharing more information over the coming months.

Thanks Codi! The new Style profile is a great feature.

Thanks, CodeKaji.  Good info.


 


Follow on question(s).


 


Per the "Ideas" site (now called uservoice  https://nintex.uservoice.com/  moved over to Nintex from ideas.k2.com) the following are SOME of the most highly voted on ideas and the date they were submitted:


 


Ability to Copy and Paste Rules 384 votes May 18 2017


Bulk file upload/attachments control 85 votes Feb 8, 2018


More toolbar icons 70 votes Feb 15, 2018


Rollback version restore for views, forms, smos 51 votes March 23, 2018


Undo Button 238 votes, May 4, 2017


Forced Check Ins


 


And of course, my personal suggestions:


 


Excel export/attach file in a workflow


Excel import to SMO (for K2 cloud...i REALLY miss this one from on-prem and the community broker)


Override check out


Exchange integration to allow K2 to control shared mailboxes


 


 


Anyway, you get the idea.  


 


Is this site even worth submitting ideas to anymore?  Do they even get looked at?  If they don't, you ought to just take the site down.  The style sheets are great, but who asked for them?  There are so many features that we lost when we lost the ability to add custom brokers to our cloud instances...shouldn't we be trying to get some of those developed?  


 


Also, is the K2 roadmap available to your customers so we can anticipate feature releases?  I seem to recall sitting at a bar in Seattle a number of years ago watching a slide show presentation where they talked about K2 release cadence and said that the roadmap would be regularly updated and shared.  Or maybe, I dreamed that?  This was, of course, pre-Nintex.


 


Anyway, thanks for the update, but I think your customer base deserves more, especially in regard to the ideas site.  You should really take it down  and/or at least update the requests and say "NO" if you're not going to move on the idea, especially the highly voted ones. 


 


 


 

Userlevel 3
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Thanks for the questions, Rob, I appreciate your feedback, and I apologize for my delayed response - I did not get a notification of your reply to this post.


We do still use the UserVoice site as a place for customers to submit feature ideas and vote for existing ones. While the ideas were moved over from K2, as you can imagine a lot has changed in terms of strategic direction for the K2 product after the acquisition. We have been working hard to align the K2 product vision with the Nintex strategic vision, and you will see updates shortly by me in UserVoice reflect those changes. I do review all of the ideas posted, and use them as we explore new features to add to the K2 components. The Style Profile feature was something requested by several customers and in UserVoice, especially for K2 Cloud that did not have the capability to create custom themes. The first iteration of that feature was limited to colors, but we are adding additional functionality to that designer over time, which should help customers style SmartForms more easily. The JavaScript Service Provider was released for K2 Cloud to have custom broker capabilities, so that customers and partners can share extensions to K2 Cloud. We are working on updating some of the technical frameworks the K2 platform uses, such as jQuery for SmartForms controls, which has also been asked for by customers.


 


There are hundreds of ideas submitted by our customers, and as much as I’d love to get everything into the product, we have to prioritize and match the strategic goals of the Nintex Product Portfolio. UserVoice is just one of the ways we determine priority, and just because an idea has a lot of votes does not mean it’s technically feasible or will be released in the product. When we have projects that will address the ideas, you’ll see the status changed to planned. You can see the K2 product roadmap on community.nintex.com by scrolling down to More Resources > Product Roadmap. This is updated monthly for all Nintex products by the Product Management team. We also hold webinars when we get close to releases to talk about what’s in the release, as well as the next set of features on the roadmap. We will be holding webinars for K2 product releases later in the year, so watch the customer newsletters and your inbox for more details and to register.


In the mean time, you should see notifications from UserVoice on items you've submitted or voted on as I update statuses. I appreciate you taking the time to post suggestions as well as voting on ideas, and we will do our best to keep the ideas up to date going forward, with more transparent communications from Nintex around roadmap and statuses. 

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