ARena

Another monthly installment of great Adobe customers. As I am currently working in the US, I thought I’d focus on Adobe Acrobat Connect customers. Enjoy!

Cranfield University School of
Management -Cranfield University’s School of Management offers high-tech, customised executive development through its Centre for Customised Executive Development (CCED). To offer customers a flexible, easily adaptable solution for eLearning, CCED adopted Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional, allowing Cranfield to develop and deliver courses in flexible ways, saving time and money for both Cranfield and its executive students.

Florida Center for Instructional
Technology – How do rural schools and teachers keep up with more urban, possibly better funded, schools? In Florida, as public schools stretch training budgets to integrate technology into classrooms, the Florida Center for Instructional Technology (FCIT) has been working with educators to integrate technology into their curricula, and utilising a combination of face-to-face meetings and Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional to train teachers and educators throughout Florida. Once certified as a "Master Digital Educator (MDE)" these trained teachers use Acrobat Connect Professional to train other educators on how best to provide the technology skills necessary to launch Florida’s students into the digital age.

Mensheds Australia Ltd -Mensheds is a unique not-for-profit organisation specialising in the health and well-being of men. Mensheds Australia was established to quickly and efficiently assist in starting, running, and growing individual men’s "sheds" across Australia.
Each men’s shed is an individual local organisation that offers opportunities for regular learning new skills—especially about health, well-being, and helping the community.
Individual men’s sheds are geographically scattered across Australia, and are managed by local governments, community groups, and motivated individuals.
Mensheds Australia needed to provide quick and easy access to products, services, and information while retaining the support of the health industry and communities.
Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional allows Mensheds Australia to use multimedia to deliver support to even the most remote communities. Members of men’s sheds can use their PCs to connect via the Internet to their local groups and individual members without being overwhelmed by the technology.

Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) -
the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), an operating unit of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), plans to adopt Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional software to enable deployed troops, support personnel, and military leaders to collaborate more efficiently across locations worldwide. This is a recent announcement – see the press release here – highlighting how the US Department of Defense is implementing Adobe Connect in "hostile" environments. From the press release: “Acrobat Connect Professional will help simplify collaboration in the DoD’s complex, diverse environments. In many operations, the real-time engagement enabled by Acrobat Connect may literally help save lives, as soldiers and military leaders share intelligence and plan strategies in response to changing conditions.”

Today, Adobe announced that the public beta of Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly code-named Apollo, and the public beta of Adobe Flex 3 are immediately available for download from Adobe Labs. The Adobe Integrated Runtime, along with Flex, are cornerstones of Adobe’s comprehensive RIA strategy for enabling developers and designers to create and deliver rich, dynamic, branded content and applications across all major operating systems.

You can read the press releases here (Adobe Integrated Runtime) and here (Flex 3)

The Adobe Integrated Runtime allows developers to use HTML/CSS, any Ajax framework, Flash and Flex to extend RIAs to the desktop. New features in the Adobe Integrated Runtime beta include an embedded local database (SQLlite), PDF support, enhanced capabilities for JavaScript developers, and deeper integration with Adobe Flex. The free beta versions of Adobe AIR and the Adobe AIR SDK are available for downloaded from www.adobe.com/go/air.  You can also get a preview of some of the early applications being developed on the Adobe Integrated Runtime from Adobe Labs.

The Flex 3 beta is a major functional release that adds rich new UI capabilities, enhanced developer productivity, desktop deployment and enterprise testing and performance tools.  The Flex 3 public beta also marks the first significant deliverable for the open source Flex project, beginning with the availability of nightly builds, and a public bug database, which will be posted at www.labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/opensource. The free Flex SDK also makes it easy for Flex and Flash developers to get started with Adobe AIR. Additionally, web developers can use the Eclipse-based Flex Builder, an advanced IDE for creating both desktop and browser-based RIA’s.

Ryan posts here with some deeper analysis.

To mark the announcement of Adobe’s newest version of LiveCycle – LiveCycle Enterprise Suite – I thought I would focus this month on customers implementing LiveCycle solutions.

Business Loan Express (BLX) – BLX specializes in long-term loans for commercial purposes, including small businesses looking to acquire or refinance real estate, as well as to finance their operations with financing needs in the range of $25,000 to $5,000,000. Almost 85% of BLX business comes from referral and repeat clients, so there is tremendous loyalty if customers are treated well. BLX use Adobe LiveCycle solutions to automate processes and better engage with customers to provide more responsive, personalized services. By implementing a LiveCycle based solution, BLX has seen accelerate loan processing; improve margins on loan; expanded it customer base; and strengthen relationships with brokers and borrowers.

Cedacri -
Based in Parma, Italy, Cedacri is a leading IT provider for financial institutions. With a turnover of €150 million in 2005, 550 employees, and a clientele of more than 60 banks, Cedacri is a market leader in IT services in Italy. One of Cedacri’s services is designing, customizing, and managing forms as well as the ultimate printing of bank statements. Cedacri wanted to move to a solution that easily generated visually appealing bank contracts, statements, and other forms for its clients. By implementing a LiveCycle based solution, Cedacri was able to eliminate formatting errors; improve design and customization of forms; generate dynamic documents; and eliminate distribution costs and time.

Penn State University -
Penn State serves more than 80,000 students at its main and satellite campuses, awarding over 16,000 degrees annually. As a large university, Penn State received more than 120,000 requests for transcripts and documentation from existing and past students. Historically, requests come in by mail, by fax, or through a web portal submission system, with approximately 25% of the requests being urgent.
One issue of critical concern to Penn State officials was the proliferation of fake diplomas and falsified transcripts—annual sales of which total more than $100 million worldwide!! Penn State implemented a LiveCycle based solution, using
Adobe
Certified Document Services
with Adobe LiveCycle Document Security software and digital IDs from GeoTrust to provide the requisite capabilities. The solution has lead to multiple benefits, including accelerated production and delivery of transcripts by more than 99%; reallocated administrative time to other student services; improved integrity and authenticity of transcripts. In addition, Penn State anticipated full ROI within one year of deployment.

US Green Building Council -watch the video

Snap-on Credit -Personally, the extent of automobile maintenance I do runs to putting petrol (gas) in the fuel tank, so I’ve never really had a need for an arsenal of tool. However if you are a
professional automotive or aircraft technician then the Snap-on brand is synonymous with quality. The financial services arm of Snap-on Inc – Snap-on Credit – works with the company’s US network of 3,500 franchisees to provide customers with financing solutions. Traditionally, franchisees input data into a stand-alone system, printed and signed the resulting forms by hand. The paper contracts were then submitted to a franchisee’s regional office, then forwards to Snap-on Credit’s main office for processing. Snap-on Credit implemented a LiveCycle based solution that allows
franchisees simply enter information into a software application on their computers and export the detail in XML into an Adobe PDF form. Electronic signatures are applied, the form validated and sent electronically to the main processing office. The benefits to Snap-on and the franchisees include: accelerating processing from several days to minutes; reducing errors from 15% to less than 2%; and improving access to special pricing promotions.

Ok, maybe not the most inspiring title for a blog entry – sorry about that – but Adobe announced last Monday the next version of our LiveCycle product – LiveCycle Enterprise Suite.

You can read the announcement here.

According to the press release: "LiveCycle ES integrates the capabilities of Adobe Flex and PDF technologies, while leveraging the reach of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Reader to enable a new class of “customer engagement” applications that easily connect people inside and outside organizations to internal information and processes."

I’ve seen a number of demos of LiveCycle Enterprise Suite and it is pretty cool – showing how you can take a plan/static PDF form off the web and turn it into a fully functional, intelligent, rich web "data collection" application by using Acrobat, LiveCycle Designer and LiveCycle Workbench ES is pretty amazing.

There have been a couple of announcements over the last few days from Adobe and Google – one announcement from Adobe (with Google included) and one announcement from google (with Adobe included).

First up was the Adobe announcement about a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop Extended that allows designers to "take further advantage of the software’s powerful compositing, painting and image-editing toolset for editing 3D content." You can read the press release here, and download the plug-in here.

Next up is the Google announcement about Google Gears. The press release can be found here.

There has been some discussion over the last few days as to whether Google Gears is a competitor to the Adobe Apollo project. As Kevin says:
"We’re very excited to be collaborating with Google to move the industry forward to a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability. The Gears API will also be available in Apollo, which enables web applications to run on the desktop, providing developers with consistent offline and local database solutions.”

Ryan Stewart provides a very clear overview of how the Google and Adobe technologies complement each other on his ZDNet blog, here.

Four year-old Madeleine McCann went missing from the resort of Praia da Luz in Portugal on the 3rd May 2007.

Madeleine McCann’s family believe these pictures of the missing
four-year-old could play a vital role in the search for her.
The photo of the youngster shows clearly the her distinctive right eye,
where the pupil runs into the blue-green iris.

It is this distinguishing mark that will identify Madeleine to those on
the lookout for her.

IF YOU HAVE A BLOG AND YOU’RE READING THIS, THEN PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD.

IF YOU’RE READING THIS AND HAVE ANY INFORMATION THAT MIGHT HELP IN LOCATING THIS LITTLE GIRL THEN PLEASE CALL CRIMESTOPPERS ON:

INTERNATIONAL: +44 1883 731 336

UK:
0800 555 111

Let’s help find her!

For a change I’m focusing on US-based customers for the April round-up.

The United Sates Defense Department -
The United States Department of Defense’s (DoD) Forms Management Program has licensed Adobe technology (Acrobat and LiveCycle) to deploy a new solution aimed at automating processes and streamline operations by providing fillable forms to all US DoD entities, including the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard and Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Defense Agencies.
The DoD Forms Management Program will provide nearly 1,000 electronic PDF forms across the military, ranging from officer commissions to facilities, medical claims, purchasing and accounts payable.

University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center (Fetal Treatment Center) -”With (Acrobat Connect) we can eliminate geographic barriers to world-class expertise for patients and physicians. Hospitals everywhere will look at our program as a new model to help save lives.” – Colin Fahrion,
UCSF Fetal Treatment Center. The Center has more expertise and experience in fetal medicine than any other institution in the world, integrating teams of specialists in surgery, genetics, obstetrics/perinatology, radiology, nursing, and neonatal medicine. Despite being a world-leader in the field, access to medical expertise can be severely limited simply by where a patient lives. By implementing an Acrobat Connect (Macromedia Breeze) solution experts at the UCSF Fetal Treatment Center are making themselves more accessible to patients and referring physicians anywhere in the world.

The UCSF has seen multiple benefits in implementing this solution, including; expanded patient and doctor access to specialist consultations; enhanced security of sensitive patient information delivered online; established new revenue streams for UCSF Medical Center; and
adhered to archiving requirements.

Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center – watch the video

Colorado Department of Transportation -
With more than 23 billion vehicle miles of travel on its roads each year, the Colorado Department of Transportation manages a 9,122-mile highway system, including 3,698 bridges
The Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) has more than 150 highway construction projects underway statewide, all of which are being built by private contractors. Last winter, CDOT maintenance teams plowed 5.9 million miles of highway—equivalent to more than 10 round trips to the moon. They also repair road damage and potholes using more than 330,000 tons of asphalt!! The Colorado Department of Transportation used ColdFusion to develop the REMS – Real Estate Management System
in only six months. This custom application helped CDOT justify new capital expenditures to upgrade existing facilities. The zero-footprint intranet application is accessible by 3,000 CDOT employees and cost a fraction of other possible commercial packages in the marketplace.

A few years ago I don’t think anyone would have described Adobe as a company that took full advantage of the open source community. But that is all changing with the announcement today that
Adobe plans to release the source code for the Flex SDK to open source
under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). You can read the full press release here.

As James puts it: "Open source co-creation is a powerful way to build a strong development community. Adobe’s decision to open source the Flex SDK is a radical move which should attract a new class of developer to the platform."

This is the fourth open/standard announcement by Adobe since the end of last year, first we contributed the source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation under the Tamarin project; then we announced the use of the open source WebKit engine in the “Apollo” project; and third we released the full PDF 1.7 specification for ISO standardization.

As the blogsphere starts commenting on this announcement I’ll pull together the links. As always, if you would like more information, drop me an email.

Adobe’s second BIG PARTNER announcement in just over a week.  Last week was the news that Adobe and salesforce.com were working together on the Flex toolkit for Apex. This week comes the announcement that Adobe and SAP are collaborating on a new product, the SAP® Enterprise Learning environment.

From the press release: "SAP Enterprise Learning environment will help enable organizations to more easily conduct, measure and track virtual classes while allowing employees to collaborate in real-time with instructors and other learners. SAP and Adobe also announced that they have entered into a global reseller agreement that allows SAP to market and sell Acrobat Connect Professional as a standalone solution for enterprise-class Web-conferencing and collaborative communication."

Read the release here (or here if you want to see it on the SAP site!).

Adobe and salesfoce.com today announced the availability of the Flex toolkit for Apex. You can read the details here, and download the toolkit here!

Apparently – "Using the new Flex Toolkit for Apex, developers can create richer application experiences for their salesforce.com deployments and Apex applications. Developers can also make their Flex-based applications available on the AppExchange directory, and deploy them on-demand and with no additional software required."

El Reg puts the announcement in context here and here.