Government Bits

Tracking how technology is transforming interaction between governments and citizens.

The following post was originally published in the Adobe LiveCycle blog.

We get many questions about Reader extensions. That’s not surprising really because there are numerous ways to use reader extensions in an enterprise capacity, as well as in a workgroup or consumer type of way. We also get many questions about the aspects of licensing reader extensions based on the fact that Reader extended forms can be created from our Acrobat family of products as well as our LiveCycle family of products. The licensing programs for Acrobat and LiveCycle are designed to serve different uses and organizational needs. They scale from desktop use to enterprise levels.

Before we go too much further though, let me explain what a Reader extended document is.

The Reader extensions capability digitally signs a PDF form or document to enable certain features in the free Reader product on a per-file basis. These are features otherwise found in the full Acrobat product.  Extending features in a PDF document allows the content creator to offer more advanced capabilities to end users with free Reader without requiring them to purchase the full Acrobat product.  Examples of the features which are enabled by Reader extensions include commenting, digital signatures, and saving forms and data offline.  We usually see customers take advantage of this technology to capture data in a form using Reader extensions based on the ability for someone to fill out a form inside of the free Reader product, save it to their desktop, and then email it to the person needing this information.

LiveCycle and Reader Extended Forms:

Here’s an example of a Reader extended form:  http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf.  This example was created using LiveCycle Enterprise Suite. LiveCycle is a server based product for automating form and document processing in enterprise organizations. The use of reader extensions in LiveCycle is targeted for large distribution use cases.  Other services available in LiveCycle can be used to generate PDF documents and forms and automate their processing in conjunction with other enterprise systems. LiveCycle’s Reader extensions capabilities are licensed on a per-document (or form) or a per-recipient basis. Its usage can scale to extract information from an unlimited number of documents or an unlimited number of recipients.   A LiveCycle customer can purchase more document or recipient licenses as their business needs require.   For example, a state that wants to develop a single tax form to collect information from its 2 million citizens might purchase a per-document license for their form.  However, a government department of 6,000 planning to develop several human resources forms might be better served with per-recipient licenses.

Acrobat and Reader Extended Forms:

As I mentioned earlier, you can also create a reader extended form by using Acrobat.  Acrobat is a desktop product for producing and working with PDF documents on an individual basis.  The reader extension capabilities in Acrobat are intended for small scale distributions.    Acrobat provides capabilities to extract data into spreadsheets for further processing.

Many times I refer to Acrobat as a Swiss Army Knife? Why? Like a Swiss Army Knife you need to have it with you always, it can help you in emergencies, and is a tool you can use daily. I use Acrobat daily in my work, even prior to joining Adobe. Many times it has been my life saver as I needed to edit a PDF file that no one could find the original document. Enter Acrobat, as my emergency rescue, I just export the PDF to Word and begin editing.

In state and local government, I find they use Acrobat the way we sometimes use a Swiss Army knife. We get out the knife blade or in Acrobat’s case the Create PDF blade and we forget there are other tools in Acrobat. In our post today I would like to explore some of the other uses of Acrobat or its other blades.

The following post originally appeared in the Adobe Standards blog.

.

Adobe Acrobat is widely used throughout the public sector, in federal as well as state and local governments, to harness the power of the ubiquitous PDF file format. Yesterday, Adobe marked a new milestone with the release of Acrobat version 11!

.

.

Kevin M. Lynch, SVP and GM of Acrobat and Document Services at Adobe, further describes some benefits of Acrobat XI in the article below which was originally posted to the Adobe Document Services blog.

.

October 1 marks a major milestone for the Adobe Acrobat business. We’re launching Adobe Acrobat XI. Acrobat XI software with cloud services is a powerful new solution that rises to today’s complex document challenges for creating, consuming, sharing and securing PDF content across devices and platforms.

Adobe PhoneGap (recently acquired with Nitobi) and its open source counterpart, Apache Cordova, are tools for developing cross platform mobile applications utilizing HyperText Markup Language (HTML), JavaScript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

What exactly is a cross platform mobile application? A cross platform mobile application is identical to a native application except it utilizes one code base to deploy the application to multiple different platforms. Why does this matter? It matters because it allows for a significant reduction in the amount of time and effort required to develop an application by not having to write it in the native language of each platform. It also allows for the use of the widely available and more cost effective skill sets of HTML, JS, and CSS for development of applications.

Adobe PhoneGap supports the following platforms:

• iOS
• Android
• BlackBerry
• WebOS
• Windows
• Symbian
• Bada

As we’ve posted about several times in the recent past (including here and here), the Adobe Gov UK team has been holding a series of webinars focused on the public sector.

The importance of open standards to the future of public sector ICT was the latest topic, for an event that took place on August 31. The event covered whether open standards finally allow the public sector to join up service delivery, what standards are key, and how will they be decided.

The panel included:

• Bill McCluggage, Deputy Government CIO and Director of ICT Strategy & Policy at the Cabinet Office
• Mark Brett, Policy & Programme Manager at Socitm
• Marc Straat, Adobe’s European Head of Standards
• Helen Olsen, Managing Editor, UKauthorITy and IT in Use magazine

An on-demand version of the webinar is now available here; we encourage you to check it out. And to participate in future webinars in the series see the ITU Live registration site here.

As always, keep in touch with the AdobeGov team on Twitter @AdobeGov.

How can we address digital exclusion and encourage the mass channel shift to low cost online service delivery that we all need?

Digital Champion, Martha Lane Fox, is calling for ‘e’ Revolution not Evolution with online becoming “the first point of contact” for public services. And the new Government ICT strategy states that the government “will work to make citizen-focused transactional services ‘digital by default’ where appropriate” – but enable a network of ‘assisted digital’ service providers for those who are unable to access this brave new world.

There is, however, much work to do in understanding the user’s needs and experience of online public services with the goal of making them simple and accessible to all.

On the panel:

• Graham Walker, Government Director for UK Digital Champion (Martha Lane Fox)
• Dr Lorna Peters, Connect Digitally, Department for Education and Hertfordshire
• Gilles Polin, Adobe’s European Head of Government Solutions
• Helen Olsen, Managing Editor, UKauthorITy and ITU magazine

An on demand version of the webcast is available from this link.

If you are responsible in any way for sharing information, whether within government or to the public, appropriately classifying information is always a challenge. There’s a full spectrum of possibilities between full, open disclosure and compartmentalized “need to know”. Especially post 9/11, most US agencies have worked hard to establish guidelines and best practices to allow access to the right information to the right people at the right time. To that end, many agencies have created what in the private sector would be called, proprietary classification schemes. Like any proprietary approach, it works very well within a certain scope, but, it breaks down quickly when confronted with a similar, but, alternative approach. The consequences of such a breakdown can vary from something as simple as an embarrassing situation to a life-threatening scenario.

So, as of November 11th, an Executive Order was signed named “Controlled Unclassified Information” (CUI) that is focused on solving this dilemma across the entire federal government. Assigned by the President, NARA will act as the Executive Agent for this Order, driving a process intended to rationalize the various approaches already in place across the agencies.

Standardization, what a good thing! Not only does this Executive Order pave the wave for a common taxonomy that can be explained, understood, used and defended by everyone, it also sets the stage for the ability to apply automation. As digital information has become the norm, replacing paper as the means to create, store and share, the need for better control mechanisms has never been greater. We see evidence of this in the news all the time. Leaks, whether intentional or not, have become more pervasive. However, without a standard approach to classifying information, leveraging technology to help mitigate the risks has been a challenge.

Imagine if you will, the ability to integrate enforceable, digital policies directly into information in a standard fashion that would be recognized government wide. Such policies would give the government the ability to dynamically control who can see information, how long the information is visible, what people can do with it, etc. Wouldn’t it be useful to have policies automatically assigned to documents to minimize the risks of information traveling to the wrong places?

I am quite encouraged to see policy standards such as CUI come about. What are your thoughts?

To learn about technology from Adobe to help, please take a moment and visit this link.

Perhaps you are aware of the National eID cards that have been issued to the majority of Belgium’s 10 million citizens. With the genesis of the idea going back to 2001, citizen’s have been using their eID cards to help with tax filings, job searches, social services, permits, licenses and other government provided services.

More recently, the Flemish E-Government and ICT-Management Unit launched the digital signature platform of Flanders. Leveraging the existing eID infrastructure, users of the platform now have the ability to easily apply digital signatures to PDF documents. By simply sending an e-mail with a document attached (most common formats are accepted), the platform converts it and returns to the user a ready-to-sign PDF document.

It doesn’t get much easier than that! Yet another great example of eGovernment at work! To find out more, click here.

Earlier today, Adobe announced the next version of our Acrobat family, Acrobat X. We sat down with long-time Adobe veteran Rick Brown, who runs product management for Acrobat, to get his perspective on the new release and how the software is used by government agencies.

• 0:03 – Rick’s responsibilities and background
• 0:45 – Acrobat X: what drove development; some of the new capabilities
• 2:50 – Acrobat in Government, including how agencies use it today

You can follow the Acrobat team on twitter @acrobat, and check out their blog here.