Process Rights

The Management Console in K2 Workspace is superseded by the K2 Management Site and you should use the K2 Management Site to administer your K2 environment, rather than Management Console in K2 Workspace. (In certain cases you may need to use the Management Console in K2 Workspace to perform tasks that are not exposed in the K2 Management Site.)

The Process Rights section is used to set rights and security for individual processes, to determine who may administer, start or report on instances of that process.

Process Rights can also be set per Group/User on multiple processes, see Process Rights (Users)

You normally have to assign security rights for workflows designed in K2 Studio or K2 for Visual Studio the first time the workflow is deployed to a new environment. (K2 Designer for SharePoint and K2 Designer gathers permission settings from the user when the process is designed, but these permissions can be subsequently modified with the Process Rights screen.). Permissions for subsequent deployments of the process do not need to be set, unless you want to modify permissions for each deployment manually. By default, K2 grants the deploying user account Admin rights to the process

Users do not require any particular permission to complete worklist items assigned to them. The fact that the task is assigned to the user implies that the user has permission to complete the task. Therefore, it is not necessary to give any permission to a user who may receive a task somewhere in the workflow and who does not need to start the workflow or report on the workflow.

K2 Security generally follows a permissive-optimistic approach. This means that the higher level of permission takes precedence, so if a user had both “Admin” and “Start” permission on a process through different groups, the Admin permission takes precedence and the user will be able to administer the workflow as well as start the workflow.

Field Description
User/Group The name of the user or group.
Admin Process Administration permission rights.
Start Process Start permission rights.
View Process View permission rights.
View Participate Process View Participate permission rights.
Server Event Process Server Event permission rights.
Type User or Group designation.
Add Click the Add button to add a user to the Process User list.
Save Click the Save button to save the user configuration to the K2 Workflow Server.

The following Process Rights are available:

Permission Description Notes
Admin

Can administer instances of the process (such as Start, Stop, Delete and Redirect) and manage process versions.

  • Normally assigned to the K2 administrator, and sometimes to helpdesk staff and the process owner.
  • Also allows the user to Start and Viewprocess instances.
  • This right is automatically added for the user that deployed the workflow.

Start Allows the user to start a process - without it the user will receive an error if attempting to start a process.
  • Normally given to a large group like “Domain Users” so that anyone can start the process , unless you specifically want to restrict start rights to a particular user or group.
  • A common error is “User does not have sufficient rights to start a process”. This usually means that the Start permission has not been configured for the process, but can also indicate a failure to persist security credentials between machines
View Can run reports against all instances of the process .
  • Normally assigned to the process owner, process administrators, management users and sometimes supervisory users.
  • Can report on all instances of the process even if they are not involved in the process instance.
View Participate

When running workflow reports, the user will only see the instances that they were personally involved in (in other words, process instances that they started or where they completed a task item.

  • Normally assigned to the same group of users that can start the process, so that users can run reports on their own instances.
  • The user will only be able to access process reports and the activity instance once it has reached the activity for which they are a destination user, or if they were the originator of the process instance.

Server Event

User account may complete an asynchronous K2 server event. Asynchronous server events wait for a call-back from the external system to finish the server event. The user account used by the external system must be granted Server Event permissions for it to be allowed to finish the server event.

Used in more advanced scenarios where a specific user account (usually, some other system) will complete an asynchronous server event in the workflow. This normally requires the server event code to include the statement K2.Synchronous = false; so that the server event will not complete until this external account connects to K2 and completes the item.