I would like to be able to add workfklow specific shapes like swimlanes to kendo diagram and being able to edit their texts.
How does that adequately answer the request? I think what the Kendo UI team should do to be truly helpful is include default workflow svg items for all of the commonly used objects in a workflow diagram.
Thanks for the proposition. You can specify your custom shapes (swimlines or other) using the diagram's shape > path attribute (http://docs.telerik.com/kendo-ui/api/javascript/dataviz/diagram/shape#configuration-path) for this purpose.