Professional K2 blackpearl®

Chapter 10. Deploying Your Processes and SmartObjects

Jason Apergis

K2 blackpearl provides tools that allow designers the ability to quickly and easily deploy processes into development, staging, and production environments. These tools to deploy K2 solutions between environments have immensely simplified the deployment process; however, there are many considerations that must be accounted for. There are multiple ways K2 processes and SmartObjects can be deployed. It's as easy as clicking through a wizard or as advanced as using the K2 API to fully automate the deployment. The K2 deployment platform is built using Microsoft's MSBuild framework providing flexibility that allows development teams to customize, extend, and automate the deployment of K2.

K2 blackpearl has streamlined tasks for deploying processes and SmartObjects into environments. For example, the K2 platform provides the Environment Library server, which contains environment contextual configurations (such as server connection strings) that can be used for a process definition. When deploying processes, the designer has to choose which environment that will be deployed to, and all of the configuration data associated with the selected environment will be deployedwith the process. Using the Environment Library server allows designers to easily move processes between development, staging, and production environments because they no longer have to manually go through process and change hardcoded configurations. Think of ...