Professional K2 blackpearl

by Holly Anderson, Jason Apergis, Sergio Del Piccolo

K2 blackpearl and the K2 platform is a large, powerful, "game-changing" application platform built on Microsoft technologies. Understanding it from top to bottom would be a great task for a single person, which is why we have gathered more than a dozen authors to supply you with the information to successfully transform your company into a process-oriented, efficient business that can grow with the K2 platform. Since this is the first book on K2 blackpearl, you will find a broad range of topics in this book, from the market in which K2 blackpearl is aimed to the architecture of the platform, from how to approach process design to developing your own custom user manager. The first part of the book is meant for everyone and provides an understanding of K2 blackpearl and where it fits in the marketplace. It is included to provide a framework for thinking about various aspects of process-driven applications, including how they differ from business process management techniques; identifying processes in your company to automate, the different pieces that make up a process; measuring the success of your efforts; and finally shifting your company's culture in the direction of process efficiency. This section may be the only section you need to read if you are sponsoring a process improvement effort in your company. If you are responsible for leading the effort, make sure to read Chapters 3 and 4. The other parts are meant to provide details on how to effectively deploy and use K2 blackpearl and include a broad range of topics. Read what you are most interested in, but also make sure to read Chapter 8, which will give you a great foundation to start designing processes with K2 blackpearl. Chapter 14 is also recommended for everyone because it provides an overview of the available K2 Designers and how you can share projects among them. If you are a developer, you may be tempted to flip through the book looking for code, and you will find some, but we also recommend reading much of the rest of the book to learn how the API and the K2 platform extensions fit within the overall process-driven application environment. Pay particular attention to Chapter 22 and the Appendix, which may save you hours of coding or give you a no-code solution to something that you may have thought would take hundreds of lines of code to accomplish. If you are an administrators, focus on Parts II and IV, but also take a look at the other chapters to gain an understanding of how your users will be using K2. K2 blackpearl is the main subject of this book, although we devote an entire chapter, Chapter 23, to the add-on product K2 connect to give you an understanding of how to bring SAP data into your processes. We also talk a bit about K2 blackpoint, particularly in the SharePoint chapters. Since K2 blackpoint is built on the K2 blackpearl foundation, many of the same concepts apply to that product as well, but we do not point out the differences between K2 blackpearl and K2 blackpoint. For that information browse to www.k2.com . We recommend that you approach this book in parts and perhaps read or reference each part differently. If you are working on a team, each member of the team may find one part more interesting to them than the other sections; that is expected and is how we designed the book.

936 pages, Paperback

First published September 9, 2008

Reviews

[j monty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is due to be released by the end of the year. I've writtin a couple chapters and done some technical editing on some others. What's unique about this WROX book is that it's not strictly targeted towards programmers, since K2 blackpearl is probably the first Workflow/BPM product to allow regular users to build workflows without having a computer science degree. This book discusses the busines side of BPM, and has assistance for business users who are designing workflows as well deep technical knowledge for developers.

[Raja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professional K2 Blackpearl is the ultimate book you need when you are learning and working with the k2 blackpearl environment. The book has a broad range of topics, from general to the very highest level of details. whether you are a naïve user, administrator or even a developer you will find this book of a great deal of help.

It is been my friend for the past year; working as a k2 application developer.
Highly recommended :)

[Delhi Irc]

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