Adobe LiveCycle ES Sales Training
It has been a while since I have written my last post. In the mean time it has been busy and the end is not yet in sight.
Mostly it’s about transition of application maintenance from another system integrator but also preparing new projects.
Although the world is suffering from a (financial) crisis, I don’t see the effect on our work yet. ECM is still booming.
Expanding our team is still possible as long as I’m able to staff him/her straight onto a project.
In other area’s we see more people without projects. I won’t be surprised if some of them look for internal career moves.
Even though I have a strong background in the financial world, this is not the topic I want to discuss in this post.
So let’s switch to the topic for today: Adobe LiveCycle.
The past week attended an internal 2-day sales training about Adobe LiveCycle. In the early days of 2007 I have done a basis training on LiveCycle 7.2 and since I’ve been kept up to speed with their developments up to LiveCycle ES, through friends at the local Adobe office.
As a result there was a lot I had seen before. Still, it is different to when you have time to truly dive into it.
For those of you that don’t know about Adobe LiveCycle ES, please take a look at www.adobe.com/livecycle.
About 2 years ago the focus was around forms and output. With the same modules – though enhanced with new functionality – the platform has transformed into an engagement platform that brings together the best of PDF and Flash technology.
The message was: customer engagement.
With the Acrobat Reader and Flash Player on the vast majority of devices (yes, not only computers… mobile phones more and more can handle flash content) Adobe is in the position the truly play the engagement card.
Somehow it doesn’t feel good with me but I’m feeling comfortable with less fancy interfaces. Fact is, that business users do care about the look and feel as well as ease of use.
Bringing Flex, Air and Flash to LiveCycle ES allows you to do something that I would love to see for many web based solutions. You just open up the PDF and start a wizard to create the slick interface. I’ve seen it, I’ve done it. It’s a matter of minutes. OK, it’s a wizard and it gives you about 95% of the solution. Most likely you will do some adjustments in Flex.
Can you image that this would be possible for Documentum or FileNet? Let’s say that you build a Documentum TaskSpace application with some dedicated screens, open a wizard and create an Air or Flash client. If that would be true… From what I’ve seen in LiveCycle ES, this should not be impossible. So IBM and EMC: are you giving it a go?
As said, I have mixed feelings. The interface and the engagement platform are appealing. There are some things that I still would like to see improved. Important to me is removing the business logic from the client interface. Even though the platform can handle the revocation of older business logic once you buy and implement Rights Management, the poor men’s applications won’t have that. I understand that it is a never ending battle between off line ease of use and the choice between multiple interfaces solutions (Air, Flash, PDF etc.). Nevertheless, best of both worlds is not the common solution.
Back in 2007 my other complaint would have been that it is just a toolkit. Today Adobe supplies solution accelerators with real assets. It reduces the work significantly. The first two are available at www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/solutionaccelerators. Like many frameworks, this too is the result of best practices derived from successful implementations.
There were two things I missed during the training: “SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe” and Conceptual drawings. The first is important to me because we have a strong presence in the SAP market. For those customers, Interactive Forms by Adobe is a natural step. At least more natural then adding the full LiveCycle platform.
The second part comes from my technical background. Pure sales probably won’t care about what is positioned where in the concept. Because I found none like what I have in mind, I created them myself. Within a few days I will share them in a second post.
