What's new in Nintex K2 Five (5.6)

Nintex has recently announced new updates and in this article, we are going to discuss the latest releases, new features, enhancements, and bug fixes of the new K2 5.6

The Nintex K2 Platform 

K2 allows you to build and run applications and solutions that automate and streamline your organization’s processes and operations. The tools and features available in the K2 platform also enable you to maintain, monitor, and improve your operations. With the K2 platform, you can create complex, integrated, mission-critical process automation at scale, all the way down to quickly rolling out lightweight departmental workflows and simple applications. The platform includes tools and features that help you create, use, report, and administer K2 applications.

Typically, designers and developers use tools like K2 Designer to build applications with data, forms, and workflows. Once you have applications created or deployed, users can interact with them using tools like the K2 Workspace (Desktop) and the K2 Workspace (Mobile). K2 also includes standard reporting tools to allow you to determine how your applications are operating, and even allows you to export reporting data for further analysis in standard reporting tools. Administrators can use tools like the K2 Management Site to secure, maintain, and configure a K2 environment.

K2 5.6 New Features

K2 Designer

Style Profile Designer Developer tab: A Developer tab is now available that allows you to use custom external resources such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript (JS) in your style profiles. This allows you to include modern capabilities, extend the look and feel of your style profile, and optimize web page behaviour.

K2 Management

• OAuth Store Encrypted Value

For added security, you can use the Store Encrypted Value option in resource type parameter configuration to encrypt sensitive information for parameters such as a client’s confidential information.

• Assure Sign Broker

Nintex K2 Five (5.6) integrates with Nintex AssureSign through SmartObjects. Create an Assure Sign service instance and SmartObjects to send documents for eSigning.

• SmartObject OData API v4

V4 of the SmartObjectsOData API exposes additional SmartObjects methods such as Create, Read, Update, Delete and Execute, in addition to the list methods supported in V3 of the OData API.

• Authorization Framework

The Authorization Framework has been enhanced to include authorization for SmartObject Service Types and Service Instances. This provides extra security to SmartObjects and increased control around the management of Service Types and Service Instances. A new Service Instances Security node has been added to the Integration node of K2 Management.

• K2 Identity web application

This version of Nintex K2 Five implements authentication on the K2 Identity web application. For authentication to work seamlessly, the Identity web application must have the same claims configuration as your Runtime SmartForms realm. If you manually configured K2 integration with AAD, you need to configure the Identity URI in Azure as a redirect URI.

SQLUM

• Lockout Policy feature

SQLUM has been enhanced to allow administrators to configure a lockout policy. In order to protect SQLUM users from brute force password guessing attacks, the lockout policy will lock an SQLUM user after the configured amount of invalid password attempts, for a configured amount of time.

Installer

• For enhancements and new prerequisites when installing or upgrading, see the Nintex K2 Five Installation and Configuration Guide’s link here

K2 5.6 Enhancements

Nintex branding 

Nintex branding and unification have been applied to Nintex K2 Five for alignment with the Nintex product suite.

Workflow

When you configure a Call Sub Workflow step in a workflow and manually type the name for a sub-workflow that has not been created yet, the Folio and variables of the sub-workflow are now automatically created for use in the main workflow. This allows you to complete the Call Sub Workflow step configuration before creating the sub-workflow. User needs to Tab or click outside the Which workflow? field to see the folio and variables.

K2 DocuSign Integration

DocuSign has announced a change in authentication techniques by deprecating legacy authentication and OAuth 1.0 protocols. Since August 2021, any new API applications integrating with DocuSign must use the OAuth 2.0 authentication flow. By October 4, 2022, all existing DocuSign customers and partners integrating with DocuSign must be updated to use OAuth 2.0, including applications already in production. Nintex K2 Five (5.6) updated the integration to the OAuth 2.0 standard. If you use the K2 Integrator Key, you will need to configure your own personal Integrator Key for enhanced security. The steps are documented in the DocuSign topic – learn more.

Bug Fixes 

Below are the Bug fixes which were done in this new version: 

• Nintex K2 Five (5.5) Fix Packs 1to Nintex K2 Five (5.5) March 2022 Cumulative Update Fix Pack 10 has been added to 5.6
• When using variables in a workflow and trying to configure the initial value of the variable, the maximum length of the field seemed to have changed.
• When using a Set Variables step in a workflow and you drag variables or environment fields that are longer than what is visible in the field, you could not navigate to the beginning of the variable text.
• When using a SQL SmartObject in a Create Reference step in a workflow, and filtering the value using an “Empty String” function to compare against a blank value in the SmartObject, the function did not execute correctly.
• When executing a List method on an Oracle SmartObject, certain characters such as “à” and “é” were not returned.
• When using a legacy theme on a form and adding multiple rows of data to an Editable List view on the form at runtime, the data is displayed as a single line entry.
• When using the rule designer in a workflow and adding an IF statement, fields could not be added to the Then/Else statement.
• When editing a workflow containing a Create Reference step, a duplicate reference was created when clicking the Create Reference step.
• When adding a new domain to AD Service 2 and trying to execute the ADService > GetGroupsByUser method, no data was returned for the domain.
• After applying Nintex K2 Five (5.4) Fix Pack 49, K2 Workspace did not load.
• Unable to configure a SharePoint site in any of the SharePoint Reference events in the workflow designer because the OK button was disabled.
• The slow performance experienced when dragging and dropping workflow steps onto the Workflow Designer canvas.
• When you run a form from a solution containing large numbers of SmartObjects and views, slow performance was experienced.
• When copying and pasting Split and Decision steps in the workflow designer and trying to deploy the workflow, a “System. Exception: Missing reference at Line ‘Processed’ . Error: While trying to resolve the following reference….” error occurred.
• When trying to create a SmartStarter app using the Document Approval template, a “Sequence contains no matching element” error occurred in the Resolve Generation step.
• When using the Worklist control and removing the default “Status not equals Sleep” filter at runtime, tasks of other users were visible.
• When creating a Workflow REST Service Instance using the Workflow REST API and trying to generate SmartObjects from the instance in Management, a timeout error occurred.

Need more information, please get in touch with our team.