Unhappy about migration options in K2

  • 15 December 2017
  • 17 replies
  • 18 views
B
Badge +8

Hello,

  I want to voice that I am not happy with the option for migration in K2. When a new version of K2 comes out we are required to upgrade within a certain amount of time or we will no longer be supported by K2 Helpdesk. The upgrade options are not easy and require us to fix or rework our current processes. Currently we are looking at upgrading to K2 Five. We are on 4.6.11. If we upgrade in place to 4.7 we take the risk of our applications breaking which require us to spend a large amount of time "putting out fires". We cannot package and deploy from 4.6.11 to 4.7 because of the difference in the package and deploy tool. We cannot package and deploy from 4.7 to K2 Five because because the package and deploy tool is incompatible. If we upgrade from 4.7 to K2 Five we will not be able to edit our workflows and we will encounter errors in our applications. 

 

  Our only real option is to do a fresh install of K2 Five on a new server then sacrafice pending workflows to rebuild these applications in a new environment. The second option is to run a dual production environment. One with K2 Five and one with 4.6.11. This would require us to buy another production license. (Probably part of the plan). So with all of this said we have the option to continue on 4.6.11 and simply stop paying a maintenance fee and forego support or we can upgrade to 4.7 and spend our time fixing problems and when that support runs out we stop paying annual maintenance and stay with 4.7. The other option is we purchase another Business Process Management solution from another company that does not put their customers in this kind of corner. Maybe we simply use Microsoft Flow. Either way the thought is what will happen if we migrate all of our applications to K2 Five which will take a lot of time to rework. Then K2 gives us K2 5.2. Are we going to have to rework all of our applications again? Are we stuck redeveloping our applications from here on out? What happens when hundreds of processes need to be migrated? 

 

  For our company this is not going to work. The processes we build are important and it will not be acceptable to have down time and it will not be fair to our users to redevelop these processes every time there is an upgrade. With the upgrade required or we will lose support. I do not know any other company that puts their customers into this kind of situation. So with all of this said we are at a point where we need to consider ditching K2 for another product (there are dozens) that will take into account the impact of future migrations on their customers or we continue with K2 and take a chance that future updates will put us in the same situation. 

 

We do not like the idea of buggy upgrades and testing in production. It feels like these upgrades are put into production for the customers to test.  This is not how we do business.

 

Thanks,

Bryan Peters

17 replies

Albarghouthy
Userlevel 5
Badge +16

Hi Bryan,


 


I think there is some confusion and misunderstanding here


 


 


I am not sure what you mean by breaking applications when upgrading from 4.6.11 to 4.7 or to K2 FIVE. 


Have you upgraded to K2 4.7 already and experienced issues with your existing applications?


 


 


If you upgrade from 4.6.11 or 4.7 to K2 FIVE you cannot edit the old processes in the new workflow designer but you will still be able to edit your processes in legacy mode and you will still have K2 Studio, I am not sure where you got the information that you cannot edit your existing workflows in K2 FIVE


 


We have asked your customer account manager to reach out to you to have a discussion about this and give you all the required information 


 


 

A

The real frustration for me is K2 Five is a "work in progress" and honestly we can't use it for our projects yet until some features are included. I don't think you should stop supporting legacy tools until you complete the product

K
Badge +10

I one of the presentations for K2 Five, the sales mention a customer with 600 K2 Forms.... I can't believe if those forms are in K2 4.6.11 got upgraded to k2 4.7 then for the transition to K2 Five you know will be forced to re-work on 600 apps if you choose to edit, this meand creating a K2 Five Workflow and re-building the old to the new.

 

If you don't do that will be only for 1 year. then you are facing the same issue. K2 Five should have a broader comprehensive path for upgrade. seems like is to much re-work on the same thing just to allow upgrade. makes you wonder what will happen in 2 years if you have to Re-Work every single think you build?. then all the cost savings are no longer going to be there.

 

Dino.

S
Userlevel 3
Badge +16

Hi all,

 

Let me chime in on this topic.

First off, great post and the sentiments expressed are exactly like what i felt when we jumped from an earlier version to 4.7 ( i think i even posted about the experience on here)

We had broken workflows, forms not working, data labels not being transferred, SMTP Mail stopped working in hybrid mode, an important custom process stopped working which we were told would not be supported moving forward, it was a horrific time for us.

Like you said, it did feel like we the customers were the Beta testers for the new verison, then having to wait weeks while bug fixes were being created, in the meantime getting ear ache from our users.

 

Reading Bryans post gave me flashbacks, because i lived it.... and that was supposed to be a simple upgrade without any issues with legacy forms/workflows like K2 Five...

 

Having got over that and now we have v4.7 tuned to perfection, we are gearing up to move to K2 Five... again this is purely because of the schedule that K2 put forward to not support older versions, not because of us wanting to move.

 

There is no way i am going back and re-visiting  all our current Live Smartforms and Workflows again (which took years to get this point) and re-creating them again in K2 Five, so our hands are tied and can only go one route.

 

That route is New Server with new OS, SQL etc etc -> Install v4.7, spend ages migrating all the forms/data/workflows/config file customisations, mail etc etc across -> Expect lots of problems (because there will be) and then upgrading to K2 Five and whatever unknown issues that will bring.

 

Why couldn't K2 provide a tool to migrate K2 v4.7 or older (which K2 now refer to as "legacy" already) to K2 Five?

As mentioned, you can still edit the workflows using the legacy K2 Studio, not sure about the Smartforms, can v4.7 forms still be edited using the Web Designer in K2 Five??? I'm not even sure how easy the New Forms/Workflow design tools will be in K2 Five, time will tell.

Either way, I have a feeling it's gonna be a pain and i'm stocking up on Energy Drinks and chocolate :-)

 

From a business point of view, you have to weigh up the amount of time taken to troubleshoot upgrades vs development time...

 

In a nutshell, K2 is amazing when it works and you're in the midst of form design and workflows there is nothing better, but when it comes to applying any form of Cummulative Update or Version, i get nervous, very nervous.

Not sure why this far along K2 still has that air of uncertainty, personally i've felt like a K2 employee Tester when any form of upgrade is required. Hope this is something that K2 can work on sooner than later.

 

Hopefully K2 Five upgrade goes ok, but i'll keep you all posted. However, i will question K2 as a product if i have a similar experience as last time.

In the meantime, it would be great for all those that have upgraded to share their experiences and any pitfalls or potential problems to look out for.

 

T
Userlevel 5
Badge +13
I echo all of your sentiments in this post as I've had a nearly identical experience across multiple clients. I do hope you share your migration experiences with the community so we can work together to make the upgrade as painless as possible.
J
Badge

hi,

Great comments about the K2 upgrades.   I lead a team of K2 developers at our company and find it's a great tool for application development.   K2 upgrades are a different story.  All the situations mentioned above, we have also experienced.   We are on 4.7 and plan on going to K2Five early 2019.   Also pushed off to 2019 because the extensive testing we're going to do in a Dev environment with K2Five.   We will spend a large amount of time regression testing our app before even getting to the QA environment.   More time than we care to but, the confidence factor is not there.    We got burned on the last 2 upgrades with light regression testing and were fixing Production SmartForm issues (refactoring) for weeks.  Learned our lesson there.  K2 can't believe it's taking us this long to upgrade and it should be a simple process.

If anyone has any K2Five upgrade experiences recently, good or bad, would be appreciated if they shared.   thanks!

K
Badge +7

Hello,

 

I am totally agree with you !! I am very much unhappy with migration . 

 

I have only one sentence that "You can't move the soltion on k2 5 easily as workable like on current state." So either dont do it or re-deveolop in k2 5 . 

 

#Unhappy # Timetaken #NoWorkablesolution.

 

Thanks.

C
Badge +7

Hello

 

I totally agree with every post. It is good to know that we are not alone in this, what I now call "Struggle" (the word migration does not have any meaning here anymore).  We to are in the Struggle(migration) phase from 4.7 to now 5.1 FP12.

I feel like we started the migration way to early and should have waited for the complete bug fixing. We are also at the same time "migrating" applications from SharePoint on-Prem to SharePoint online and for one application, we have run into a show stopper and are now getting information from Support that what we are doing is not supported :-(). We also have learned that migrating the old workflows to the new workflow engine is not possible, reworking the workflows is the only solution, which in turn is causing the budget to run over (Finance is not happy with us) - ROI - forget it! 

While I believe that the application in itself is very good, I am beginning to run out of patience and have begun to look at alternatives, Nintex and the like. 

K

All the comments are exciting me to share my more experience. 

 

Here is the list of issue we are facing during migration. 

1. SharePoint solution from on prem to Online is not possilble . 

2. Legacy workflow migration doest not support at all.

3. You can't user any exiting DLL based solution. 

4. All the workflow cusotm code event are breaking.

5. Manaul workflow deployment is also not possible say's smart object not found. 

6.SQL Azure connection for k2 data base was an stopper , Installation was not working. 

7.Custom functions are removed ( so not supported )

8. Activity destionation user event is not supported so all the older mapping get loss. 

9. Lithium theme was breaking , was not working at all.

10.After migration k2 category was breaking for soltution . 

11. Duplicate email was sending in k2 5 while send email.

12. View flow navigation doest not work for IPC . 

13. YOu can't navigate to sub process by clicking on view flow as previous versions.

14. IPC was taking 3 hours to start child workflow.

15. Redirect was not updating the user's in view flow .

 

I have encountered this much error till now . Many more are fixed and many more we are getting every day...

 

Thanks .

S
Userlevel 3
Badge +16

Can anyone answer these simple questions on editing v4.7 forms and k2 studio workflows in K2 Five?

 

If upgrading from K2 v4.7 to K2 Five, can you still edit your existing v4.7 Smartforms? -If so, how? K2 Five Designer is using the the same designer URL as previous versions, so will you be able to edit existing v4.7 Smartforms on K2 Five? If this is not possible, i will be extremely dissapointed.

 

I know it's been said that Legacy tools like K2 Studio will still work to edit and update older workflows, but can any customers confirm this is the case and does not break any functions/events?

 

I feel a rant coming on, but i'll wait for the above answers first...

E
Badge +10
Hi Sharpharp1,

Yes, you can still edit 4.7 forms in K2 Five - IF you have upgraded from 4.7 to K2 Five. A clean K2 Five installation does not install the legacy designers.

When you navigate to the Designer URL, you will be able to edit the 4.7 forms in the legacy Silverlight designer.
A
Badge +6

Hello,

 

You can edit the k2 form in k2 five there is no issue. Legacy tool is availble only for workflow and this will be availble only if you have upgraded the k2 4.7 server into k2 5 . If you have a clean installation then legacy tool wont be avaiblle. 

 

The URL for designer and managment will be same along with k2 studiok2 for visual studio. 

 

Having said there is some issue when you are upgrading the solution. To edit the legacy workflow in k2 5 what do you do. please find the below steps.

1.Create the same project solution on k2 5 with existing name.

2.Add the existing project items as Process in the solution.

3. Try editing the legacy workflow and deploy it. 

 

Reason why i said above steps in some scenario when you will open the legacy solution then this throw an error but if you create a solution and add the process on k2 5 then it work. 

For Smart forms and smart object you don't have to do anything. 

 

Let me know if you are still unclear about it. 

 

Thanks.

L
Badge +2
100% agree with you
i am planning for upgrade from 4.6.11 to K2 5 side by side and based on this post and most of the replies i see the safest path is to upgrade to 4.7 first then to K2 5, can anyone confirm this ?
C
Badge +7

I believe this is the required path anyway and I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong here.

we did a side by side update due to requirements that we had.  

M
Badge +11

If by side-by-side migration you mean installing clean 5.x server keeping your old 4.6.x or 4.6.11 server alive then migrate solutions to new box using PnD then it wont work as you cannot deploy from 4.7 or older to 5.x - as explained in "Package and Deployment between K2 Versions" KB. To get your 4.6.x/7 solutions in K2 you will need to do in place upgrade to 5.x. With some expirience you can do 5.x installation on clean server which has no K2 components and let it upgrade copy of your existing K2 4.7 DB.


What I would recommend you is to keep your old version installation alive in VM or somehow else in case you will need to check some rules which may lose their configuration in some way. A lot of people get upset about this part, but this all should be well known if you upgrade from older versions to 4.6.11 and beyond - ever sinse there is some ALM improvements which sometimes start to highlight rules and other configuration issues which were not highlighted before - this causes a bit of pain to iron this out, but saves you from the pain of deployment bad things into upstream environments.


If you want your upgrade to be smoot, read release notes, compatibility matrix. And most importantly test, test, test. Most common erro I see is when customers generously allow 2 week between upgrades of their environments yet fail to do complete functional testing of their solutions and forms within these time even with 4 weeks of testings and two environments before production, people fail to faind broken bits - just because no real testing was made beyon I can open some forms and Management/Workspace. Trust me these tests must be OK by default but you need to test that workflos flow through entire execution flow and all your form UIs are fully functional - failing to do this during test upgrade is the most common error causing most of the frustration.


For legacy designers no longer supported it is a necessary evil, otherwise there is no way to move product evolution forward. And if you explore migration options this is not that abrupt and only thing we can complain about is redesigning of workflows - which optimist should consider as an oportunity to revisit workflow design and improve it, documenting it along the way. Providing that vast majority of worflows will keep running and your only problem is editing them (alleviated by ability to stick with legacy designers for some time) transition can be graceful and controlled (with some working hours investments, yes).

P
Badge +13

After attending the K2 Five Core training, I find some integration points missing from 5.2 compared to 4.7.
1. No SmO integration with client event/email that passes SN through. I have custom email code based on external data to populate To/CC with SN in the email. 5.2 - no SmO connectivity.


2. I use IF(condition, A, else 😎 inline function to assign destination but read the IF isn't available?


3. No Process Finish Rule (nice to have in 4.7, not deal breaker) - we use this as a catch-all to prevent any premature completion in silence due to line conditions not matching (through SmO).


4. Reduced customization/integration in user destination to support custom delegation.

 

4.7 support should not end until all integration capabilities that 4.7 can call external code are in K2 Five.

M
Badge +11

@PYao For point (2) - this indeed was missing feature in 5.0-5.2, one of the clients logged idea on ideas.k2.com to get this functionality back to the product, some people voted for it and we now have confirmation that this functionality is already available in K2 Cloud Update 7 and it will be available in the next release of K2 Five later this year. You can see more details here: https://ideas.k2.com/ideas/APIT-I-468

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