On a day to day basis I keep repeating people to always check on with K2 compatibility matrix before installing or upgrading their K2 environments. Very frequently people try to mix K2 with too new Microsoft components which weren’t tested with their version of K2. But there is an opposite issue when Microsoft infrastructure components lag behind in terms of patches/versions fully supported by their release of K2. I know quite a few people still using SharePoint 2010 with K2 4.6.11. So with SharePoint 2010 being an old thing in itself people often skip CUs for this product for some reason which is unknown to me. In this article I want to discuss what is the latest CU for SP 2010 supported by K2 4.6.11 (note that with 4.7 K2 dropped support for SP 2010) and how to install it.
What is the latest CU for SP 2010 supported by K2 4.6.11? As usual you have to check compatibility matrix, but you have to find old one, which will show you this:
And this:
Does it mean that newer CUs will break something/won’t work with K2? Not necessarily, it only means that it won’t be supported because it has not been tested. At the time of release of 4.6.11 latest SP 2010 CU available was August 2015 CU and hence all testing and QA was performed against this CU – K2 cannot guarantee that all will work with newer CUs.
With that knowledge if you are still on SP 2010 it makes sense to make sure you running “newest” supported CU for it. Easiest way to do that is fire off SharePoint Management Shell on your SharePoint server and execute the following command:
(Get-SPFarm).BuildVersion
This will give you your current build:
Having this information look up in SP builds list @ Todd Klindt’s SharePoint Admin Blog to translate this into CU and SP levels, for example 15.0.7106.5000 translates into August 2013 CU:
Note that there may be minor last digit discrepancies depending on how you look up for build number. So now I know that my SP 2010 is August 2013 CU and for K2 4.6.11 I can go up to August 2015 CU (download link) from that – let’s try to do it.
First things should go first – backup your SharePoint environment. Navigate to Central Administration > Backup and Restore and click Perform a backup – just go through the wizard and create full farm backup. It can be good idea to test that your backup can be restored.
Once backup is done an CU file is downloaded launch it, accept license terms and hit “Continue”:
CU installer will check for installed updates and proceed with extracting files and installation of update after that:
Once done it will ask for reboot:
Most frequent mistake in all this process it assuming that after reboot of your SharePoint server you will be running updated SharePoint version. Quick check with (Get-SPFarm).BuilVersion will show you the same build as it was before you started CU installation process. So update is not finished just yet and to complete it you have to locate SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard in Start Menu:
and run it. Next you just go through the wizard’s steps to complete upgrade:
Warning you got in the very beginning should be taken seriously if you do this on a server used by other people where IIS reset may have undesired impact:
Once all configuration tasks completed you should get confirmation of successful configuration and click Finish button:
After clicking on Finish it will take you to CA main page automatically. In CA you can navigate to Upgrade and Migration > Upgrade Status where you can see confirmation of successful upgrade:
And now it is time to issue (Get-SPFarm).BuildVersion command once again:
First execution of the command on the screenshot was made before running of SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard and the second after wizard completion – now we run build 14.0.7155.5000 which is the latest SharePoint 2010 build officially supported by K2 4.6.11.