K2 Designer is K2’s browser-based SmartForms design studio. A little bit of friendly advice: Don’t use it with IE 8.

IE 8 is our company’s current version standard for Internet Explorer because of some older technology we must support. I’ve come to use Firefox to navigate anything related to K2’s website, because nothing would display correctly in the older browser. Still, given the advantages of IE use in the K2 Workspace, IE must be my first choice when it comes to K2 blackpearl.  

I spent way more time than I should have designing a SmartForms-based solution over the past couple of days because I was using IE 8 to develop the SmartForms. IE 8 caused me a lot of frustration and added a lot of development time — mostly because it simply cannot hang with the Designer’s rules engine. It seems that the majority of things I wanted to do were… “exceptional.”

Out of desperation, I tried using the Designer in Firefox — and it worked flawlessly. So this morning I installed IE 10.

I intend to reopen my SmartForms solution this morning in IE 10. Something tells me all will be rainbows and sunshine.

By the way — K2 blackpearl 4.6.7 supports IE 8 in runtime only — meaning business people using production workflows can use IE 8 to participate in the processes (view flows, use the Workspace, et cetera).

 My advice: From a K2 perspective, upgrade to IE 10. If you’re in an account like mine that must stick with IE 8, consider standing up a VPC with IE 8 on it for the times you have to support the legacy sites — OR stand up the VPC with IE 10 on it and do your K2 development work from there. Either way, you’ll be way happier with IE 10 for K2 development.