K2 Blackpearl 4.6.11 to K2 Five 5.2 Upgrade

I would say that can expect issues.  You first have to upgrade to 4.7 to get to 5.2.  However, I wouldn’t simply do it all at once.

I would recommend that you should do a planned migration to K2 4.7 first. Fix the form errors (discussed below).  Upgrade UAT to 4.7 test, upgrade Prod to 4.7.

With 4.7 K2 designer identifies orphaned rules, controls and such that didn't affect anything in 4.6.11 but in 4.7 will prevent you from deploying any changes until they're fixed.   Note that it would be very common (I'd say expected) that you will have errors.  The amount of errors and the time it will take to fix the errors will greatly depend on how many forms and such your organization has and the complexity of the forms.  You can't really know until you do the upgrade.

Once all the errors are fixed and after a stabilization period then I would upgrade from 4.7 to 5.2.  Because the form issues have already been fixed in 4.7, this migration should proceed smoothly.  There are lots of new things in K2 5.2, especially the new workflow designer, but because you’re upgrading from 4.7 you’ll still be able to use K2 Studio for your old workflows until you’re ready to rebuild them in the K2 5 Workflow designer.

Hope this helps.

Tim

You answer helped me also, but I have one more question what would happen if we have complex workflows which ar ebuild using K2 for Visual Studio and also have custom service brokers. Will those will be updated when we upgrade to 5.2 from 4.7?

Also what other kinds of issues to expect  (in Forms, Views, SO, Workflows, Custom Service brokers, also we have some custom DLLs reffered in workflows) when moving to 5.2? 

Regards,

Nick

Good day Niket;

Whenever upgrading I recommend reading through the release notes if you have not already done so:

http://help.k2.com/kb002301

Also here are some guidelines on upgrading to K2 Five:

Upgrading to K2 Five:  http://help.k2.com/kb002045

MSMQ errors in the K2 Five (5.x) Server Log: https://help.k2.com/kb003218

I would recommend reading through these two KBs to familiarize yourself with any known issues or changes to the product that could affect your current processes after the upgrade. If you currently use legacy designer tools such as K2 Studio, K2 for Visual Studio, or the Silverlight Web Designer please be aware that you will need to upgrade your servers from 4.7 -> K2 5.0/5.1 to still have access to these components. They are not installed on a fresh install of K2 Five. 

All current running workflows on your production server will continue to work unless they were built on K2 .NET 2003. Per as the above FAQ by customers.

Q: If I upgrade to K2 Five, will my 4.7 based workflows continue to work?
A: Yes, except for K2.net 2003 workflows.  All workflows continue to run and new instances can be started. You can maintain those 4.7 based workflows using the 4.7 designers and the workflows are supported.

The only issues which you might experience is having to tweak your custom themes to account for changes in the K2 core theme - custom controls will continue to work as expected, workflow behavior will not change and form rules will not have to be modified as long as they were accurate in the first place (before you upgrade, use the K2 Package and Deployment wizard to build a package containing ALL of your forms and views, do make sure they are all clean).

Lastly after upgrading to K2 Five please make sure you apply the latest fix-pack for the K2 five version you have installed, and you will be all set to go.

Best regards,

Dumisani

Hi, Nick.

We just went through the upgrade from 4.7 to K2 Five 5.2 .

All the workflows (same ones that you mentioned) were migrated without issues.

The only hurdle we hit was the Custom Theme.  The symptom was: all the radiobuttons and checkboxes appreared as "selected" on every form.