posted on Saturday, February 05, 2005 5:28 PM
by
Benjy
Windows Orchestration Engine (and the future of K2)
Looks like some of this information is now in the public domain. As most of us BTS users know HWS aint going very far. But whats more interesting is that it will soon die an official death. Just like WSS (or an extension to it), there is going to be an Orchestration Engine baked into Windows and newer versions of BizTalk will build on top of it.
This is actually pretty good since most products need orchestration and workflow and MS CRM, SharePoint, BTS etc can all do with one. In fact it would be easier to make simple workflow applications with just InfoPath and WinOE / WSS.
Some of the posts also mention that there is speculation that MS will buy out K2 completely. (Or maybe they will just help K2 to build a more enhanced product on top of WinOE). That may not be good news for K2 (although it might be alright for K2 users if they are provided with migration and upgrade tools), but from a license cost point of view, it does help quite a bit since we dont have to consider an add-on product just to do workflow. I dont favor be-spoke development for this and I would opt for a tool like K2 any day in the current environment, but if its going to be baked into Windows, thats a nifty cost saver.
Whatever the outcome of all this, there are some very interesting days ahead for all of us.