Information Assurance
John Landwehr has posted about protecting corporate board materials and confidential information on his blog.
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We ran a very successful Adobe Analyst/Customer day (I must think up a catchier name than that) last week in London. Good feedback from the analysts who attended as well as the customers.
We had 4 outstanding customers attend - GlaxoSmithKline, Cable & Wireless, Milton Keynes Council and INPS (In-Practice Systems). What struck me most was the passion and credibility that came across from the customers when talking about technology - both Adobe technology and the other elements of their various infrastructures.
Cable & Wireless are a Breeze (now called Adobe Connect) customer and use the technology for e-learning and rapid training of their employee base. William Ward outlined some truly outstanding ROI numbers when talking about using the web as a training and learning platform over some of the more traditional training methods.
Milton Keynes Council - represented by Adrian Blair from HBS - demonstrated that with the right technology (Adobe LiveCycle Workflow and e-form solutions in this case) and a smart, innovative approach to delivering local council services, councils can move away from the old view of paper-laden, inefficient civil service to a dynamic "citizen-centric" approach which better serves the people of Milton Keynes. It has also helped the council "upgrade" to a 3-star council. They may still have plenty of roundabouts and concrete cows in Milton Keynes, but they seem to be on their way to changing the view of local council service delivery.
GlaxoSmithKline - represented by Paul Donovan - talked about the complexities inherent in the pharmaceutical industry, coupled with the heavily regulated and compliance-bound nature of the industry. GSK are using Adobe e-forms technology - linked into SAP ERP systems - to radically improve the seemingly impossible task of keeping drug labels up to date! Might sound trivial, but when you look at a complex company like GSK - with hundreds of products, 60+ manufacturing centres across the world and the FDA keeping a very close eye - it is massively complex and a very interesting challenge!
Finally Simon Fanthorpe from INPS demonstrated an as-yet unreleased patient records-management system with Flex at the front end. The term Rich Internet Application is used widely these days, but when you see a mission critical application like the one being developed by INPS you can truly see the power of the web as an application delivery mechanism. When you talk about over 10'000 concurrent users and tens of millions of records on the back-end database it's truly amazing to see the potential!
I'd like to thank the customers for giving their time to prepare and present these great solutions, and the analysts for coming - I hope you all found it interesting, I know I did.
All the customers have kindly offered to talk to analysts in the future - so if you would like to hear more - analysts only - then drop me an email and we'll try to hook you up.
This is a very important announcement for Adobe, in part because it is the first combined launch of Adobe and former Macromedia products. By integrating Acrobat 8 and Acrobat Connect, Adobe is helping customers to communicate and collaborate with confidence, both on-demand and in real-time.
I've been running the beta of Acrobat 8 Professional for a few weeks and it's very cool some great new features and a great UI.
Rather than blogging the details, you can see the press releases here, and for more information on the Acrobat family you can look here.
Also Breeze - sorry Connect - has to be the most simple to use and "low impact" web conferencing tool (that I have used anyway). I know analysts normally hate being invited to briefings via web conference - trying to download web conferencing client software either through a corporate firewall or whilst sitting in an airport departure lounge is never going to lead to a good experience. Acrobat Connect uses the Flash Player client - which is already on 98% of PC's (Mac's etc, etc) connected to the internet -so nothing to download - just type a URL into the browser and you're "good to go"!!
Adobe UK marked the announcement with a media and channel launch in London's Regent's Park. This was the first public outing for the Acrobat Domes (pictures soon). For more information on the Adobe Acrobat 8 UK tour, click here.
If you want more info on Acrobat, Acrobat Connect or the UK Acrobat Tour, drop me an email.