"It flippin’ rocks" – says Micheal Gannotti

In late February 2008, there were a bunch of Microsoft guys gather in Seattle for the “Tech Ready” conference – only a few thousand delegates !

There were lots of blogs & posts about what was new/happening – including some podcasts & videos.  Micheal Gannotti on SharePoint has an interview with a few of the guys from K2. 

• Interviewer : Micheal Gannotti – Principle Technology Specialist (Microsoft)
• Interviewee-1 : Jeff Shuey – Global Alliance Director (K2)
• Interviewee-2 : Shaun Leisegang – Principle Technical Specialist (K2)

When customers look to ramp up workflow and business productivity management with SharePoint and take it to a new level often the first word out of my mouth is K2.

K2 is a Microsoft partner that provides tools and services that allows you to pull together business processes, people, services, information and systems into a single application that helps drive business.

In this interview I talk with some of the great folks over at K2 about the latest iteration of their toolset, Blackpearl, as well as about some pending updates/add-ons to the Blackpearl application that may be of interest to customers.

Blackpearl not only integrates with, and extends SharePoint, but does the same for Exchange, SQL, and Biztalk as well.

Video and Podcast: Tech Ready 6 Interview with K2 on Blackpearl and Upcoming Additions

The interview covers a lot about the different K2 workflow designers – esp. Visio, MOSS K2 Web Designer, and then within K2 for Visual Studio.

And – some “things on the horizon” – hitting the business users with new designer – aka K2 Studio / Office-2007 look-and-feel – available in Tech Preview pack.

Process portals get a mention too – rich reporting and set of tools to help monitor processes.

And – can even trigger a workflow based on a trigger from PerformancePoint – such as “revenue drops below $1m per month”.

Well worth a listen – the audio podcast goes for about 10 mins – the sound on the video clip is a bit distorted – better to just go for the audio version.