I just finished attending a webcast on K2 4.5 and I thought Id share a few quick thoughts.

Power User Story Improved

Given it is just a presentation and I havent actually played with it, the story seemed improved and more believable that real world power users would be able to define workflows in SharePoint.  Power users who would be comfortable with Excel functions may be able to do some more worthwhile workflows since there is new support for inline functions and conditions.  The new SilverLight K2 designer seems pretty user friendly, though the dialog windows can really stack up which may get confusing.  I thought the neatest part was that the workflow can be defined just by starting with a SharePoint Lists settings which may be okay for some organizations and simpler workflows that dont need to define the workflow and push it through lots of testing in different environments.  The standalone K2 Studio is back.  In K2 2003 it was required because Visual Studio integration didnt exist.  Its back now for use by power users who need functionality up to the point of code.  Not sure if this

Administration/Installation

Installation is supposed to be simplified, with unattended install and other details I didnt catch.  Install and configuration has always seemed daunting to me so anything to improve that is good.  Related to that there is a new tool that is meant to help diagnose issues in your installation.  That may include figuring out missing permissions or services that arent running.  Also, now all K2 SharePoint features deployed as solutions.

Dynamic SQL Service Broker

Create a smart object to go against a table that you created, NOT the SmartBox.  This seems promising and something that maybe should have been there all along.

Reference Event

Allows you to call functionally that youve referenced, in the sample showing it was calling a web service that was referenced.  It seemed odd because it was really like writing code using dialogs (call constructor, set timeout, call web service method).  Seemed a little odd to me.

Help

We were reminded that help.k2.com site is newish site that is supposed to be the MSDN of K2 for partners and customers.

VS 2010 Support

Still no hard date on this, but what we were told is approximately 90 days after VS 2010 is officially released.

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