Increasing its focus on the end-user experience and enabling developers and designers to more quickly get to deployment, Adobe introduced its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite 2.5 at its annual MAX conference today in Los Angeles. ES2.5 includes accelerators as a starting point for easy deployment and management of solutions, as well as a connector for Microsoft SharePoint 2010, new tools for interacting with mobile devices, and other features.
The Correspondence Management Solution Accelerator 9.5 is a template that enables designers to manage and customize a document’s content before going out to a customer, said Ben Watson, principal of enterprise user experience at Adobe.
Through the interactivity of Flash and RIAs, the Interactive Statements Solution Accelerator 9.5 allows end users to interact with an application within a PDF. For business users, the Managed Review & Approval Solution Accelerator 9.5 offers an interface for managing, reviewing and approving documents.
Although the accelerators are not new, in ES2.5, they are fully packaged solutions or “building blocks” in the most common use cases for end users and designers, Watson said.
ES2.5 also includes an updated connector for Microsoft SharePoint 2010, which allows developers to merge LiveCycle Process Management with the SharePoint user interface. According to Watson, LiveCycle can be used to extend SharePoint’s capabilities, or to replace the SharePoint process management engine.
In addition, ES2.5 will offer a standards-based CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) connector for abstracting the connection to content management systems. This provides a single way to establish a connection as long as the repository supports the CMIS standard.
“Everywhere there’s a piece of interaction or user experience associated with [interaction], we give you a starting point that helps you get going…Think of them as sophisticated starting blocks and interfaces,” Watson said.
For Android, BlackBerry, iOS or Windows Mobile devices, Adobe LiveCycle Mobile ES2 enables an organization’s employees to remotely process and approve tasks; connect to content management systems that support the WebDAV protocol; initiate tasks and requests; and capture or manage data in real time.
With ES2.5, “We’re starting from the point of an experience that needs to be delivered, and then determining which parts of Adobe technology need to be brought to bear in order for users to do that most effectively,” Watson said.
Other enhancements in ES2.5 include the ability to embed real-time collaboration capabilities such as chat, video, and application and screen sharing within RIAs, in addition to an improved LiveCycle Workbench for developers. The Eclipse-based tool allows developers to visually lay out process diagrams and configure process steps to connect to back-end systems.