Collaborative Methods

We’ve always anticipated that our customers may want to graduate from the pay-per-use model to a more high-volume, predictable cost model, or just simply want something that is more customized or conducive to customer needs. Well, we now have more ways to buy LiveCycle Collaboration Service so you can have it your way — here are all the options!

1. Pay-per-Use via Payment Card: This is already available today, and it’s a easy, low-cost way to get started. It’s perfect for smaller projects or for folks who just want to pay as you go.
2. Concurrency via a Specialist: This new purchase option is an annual subscription model based on peak concurrent connections — so, no more bandwidth, messages, user minutes. For each concurrent connection you buy, you can consume as much as you need. This model is great for large projects with high-volume usage and for those who need a more predictable cost model. You can simply estimate the concurrency needed from your total customer base. Full-time support coverage and a service level guarantee are also included. For more information on this option, contact a specialist at 888-649-2990 or request a consultation.
3. Become an OEM Partner: This is an option for those who want to OEM LCCS as it gives you some leeway to structure a more customized agreement. The goal of the program is to work with partners to find a “win-win” model. As an example, a profit sharing arrangement might work here. We’ll need to work with you to understand your business model to better construct an agreement, but if you’d like to go down this path, request to become an OEM partner.
4. Single-Tenant via ConnectSolutions: This option is perfect for customers that need dedicated hosting (single-tenant) and customized deployments of LCCS. Unlike the multi-tenant model provide by Adobe, you can work with ConnectSolutions to construct a custom Service Level Agreement. For more information, please visit the ConnectSolutions website.

If you have questions about what this is all about or need helped deciding which model works best for you, please visit us in our forums.

Yeah, we know, it’s been quiet round these parts – too quiet. Let’s review – in October, we announced commercial availability of LCCS, which was a pretty big deal, and gave us an excuse to make lots of noise. It also had a downside – we’d literally spent 5 months doing little else but designing a pricing model, working to stand up a pay per use eCommerce implementation, making our usage reporting and quota systems work, and building user account storage that would allow for all these new pieces. Toss in a quick rebranding, and you’ve got a fair swath of time with no significant new features.

As product folks, this kinda bummed us out. There were so many big things we’d wanted to do, new use-cases we knew we could unlock for users, if we could just… get… back… to… work…. Enter : the April LCCS Feature Explosion!

We decided to set a longer-term release target (5 months, which is RIDICULOUSLY long for us, but factors in the holidays), and chase some bigger whales this time around. Let’s introduce a few of them – as usual, you can download the SDK by logging into the dev portal.

Server-to-Server HTTP APIs – Publish and subscribe to messages from your own server to ours, from the comfort of HTTP. Manage user roles, create and configure nodes – this allows your server to be the OWNER of a room, and enforce business logic over things going on there. Build a chat with profanity filtering or auto-translation, allow your server to be the dealer in a poker game, or subscribe to messages to keep a transcript of a session. This one’s been a long time coming – help us validate that we’ve nailed it!

New Flash Player 10.1 libraries, for unlocking the crazy new P2P APIs in the next player :
:: P2P group data messaging – take any node and configure it to be P2P, and run whiteboards, chat, or other shared models without passing messages through the LCCS service.
:: Audio / Video multicast – great for broadcasting to large groups, this allows the recipients of your A/V streams to help republish those streams, vastly reducing the load on the original publisher, and allowing you to scale to a much higher number of recipients.

Large room support – We know that people want to be able to use LCCS rooms as “lobbies” or landing rooms where they can stay connected to the service in order to receive messages around where to go next. By changing their presence settings, these lobbies can now easily support 5000 users (actually, waaay more, but we’re capping it for now until we’ve finished some other tuning).

Buddy List presence – This goes really well with large lobby rooms. You can easily allow users to declare a list of their “buddies”, who’ll be the only people able to see that user’s presence. If you wanted to build large-scale presence networks, these APIs will do the trick.

Private streams – We’ve made it much, much easier to have publishers decide who in the room they’d like to stream their A/V to. Simply set a list of users on the publisher, and you’re off to the races.

Multiple private message recipients – this one’s been requested forever, and we’re kicking ourselves for not getting to it sooner (sorry Faizan). Simply specify your list of recipients on the message, and it gets delivered to them all.

Cluster-wide support of RTMFP. No more ‘protocol=”rtmfp”‘ needed – if you compile against the player 10 libs, this just happens by default (you can still opt out of course!). In fact, you can REQUIRE that users only come in via RTMFP.

A jillion bugfixes. Thanks so much to everyone on the forums for keeping at us to make things better. We definitely need your help now – start trying the new stuff, and report whatever seems wrong or broken. The next release won’t take 5 months, promise =).