My New Toy: K2 Blackpearl

My company recently purchased K2 Blackpearl and I've been tasked to spear-head this project. We intend to use Blackpearl to host and support most of our enterprise workflows.

The challenge:
- We have to support multiple domains in our environment, with a OWFT configuration.
- We do not wish to install K2 components in our SharePoint environment (after a terrible experience with Blackpoint)
- We have complex form requirements (to be fair, this almost has nothing to do with Blackpearl)

First impressions:
I understand that Blackpearl prides itself from providing simplicity to business users in the creation and deployment of workflows. Thankfully, Blackpearl exposes its API and allows you to manage the code of each activity/event, which I thoroughly find comfort in. (A/N: I'm a hard-core developer and I don't really like drag-and-drops).

aspnet_merge.exe

I installed the VS2008 Web Deployment Projects on my machine and when I try to run msbuild (for K2 Workflow deployment) I am getting this error:

System.Exception: The forms could not be published successfully to the server. Please review logger details for more information. Logger Error: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\WebDeployment\v9.0\Microsoft.WebDeployment.targets(575,9,The specified task executable location "bin\aspnet_merge.exe" is invalid.)

It seems that aspnet_merge.exe is not packaged together with VS2008. One solution is to install the Windows 2008 SDK.

Alternatively, can try to extract the exe file from another machine with Visual Studio installed and place it in this folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1

You might also need to set the environment variable for FrameworkSDKDir:

SET FrameworkSDKDir="C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1"

References:

http://www.weask.us/entry/visual-studio-2008-web-deployment-projects-error-finding-aspnet-merge-exe

http://forums.asp.net/t/1228077.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479568.aspx

K2 BlackPoint: Change Worklist Item Email Template

The reference is here: http://devk2.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/k2-worklist-item-email-how-to-change-the-mail-template/

From what I heard, blackpoint 4.5 allows customisation of this email template via a wizard. Hope that's true!