What we have provided you so far:

- Updated the installation and configuration documentation for each of the Service Packs to address reported issues
- Provided new documents such as “Techniques for Configuring Applications for LiveCycle Workspace ES”
- Responded to LiveDoc comments requesting more clarification or information on certain topics, and updated the online documentation with these responses. (Please keep the comments coming!)
- Posted new articles on the LiveCycle Developer Center such as “Displaying LiveCycle ES process data in Flex graphs” or “Using Java servlets to invoke LiveCycle ES processes”.
- Posted new technical notes on the LiveCycle Knowledge Base to clarify technical issues encountered by you. We continue to roll these type of notes into our documentation for the next release.
- And last, but not least, all of the posts on this new LiveCycle documentation blog.

What are we working on for you for a future release:

- Improving the discoverability of the documentation. This includes redesigning our documentation web page and investigating ways to improve the usability of the documentation and your search experience.
- Providing more “getting started” content for the new LiveCycle user and using new media such as video tutorials.
- Integrating our content with the content on the Developer Center and community contributors.
- Providing more samples and quick starts and making them easier to find and use.

Please continue to send us your feedback on the documentation. This blog is the perfect way to contact us.

And, don’t forget to check out LiveCycle Café and the Tour de LiveCycle. Both of these applications have an abundance of information to help you develop your application or troubleshoot a problem you may have encountered.

LiveCycle ES is a development platform that lets you develop enterprise solutions to automate business processes. Some companies spend time and effort to process information the old fashion way; that is, by using paper-based forms only. And by doing so, information is lost or a lot of cost is involved processing the paper-based forms. As a LiveCycle ES user, you can use its functionality to develop a LiveCycle ES application to automate business processes. You can use Workbench ES, the LiveCycle ES SDK, or a combination of both. The LiveCycle ES SDK is provided to enable you to create client applications that can invoke LiveCycle ES services.

One type of use case is using both the Workbench ES and the LiveCycle ES SDK. That is, you use Workbench ES to create a process that automates your business processes. Then you can use the LiveCycle ES SDK to create a client application written in Flex, Java, or a development environment that supports web services. The client application is used to invoke the process created in Workbench ES.

For example, if you belong to a company that develops in Java, you can invoke a process from a Java client application. It does not matter if the Java application is an EJB bean, a Java Swing application, a Java servlet, or a console application.

When using the LiveCycle ES SDK, you do not have to create a process using Workbench ES. For example, you can develop a web application that directly invokes a service, such as the Forms service. In this situation, the web application is able to render interactive forms to users in a web browser. To develop this type of data capture application, you use the Forms service Java API. This LiveCycle ES application is created without using Workbench ES. Most LiveCycle ES services have a Java API that enables you to directly invoke the service.

On the other hand, you do not have to develop a client application using the LiveCycle ES SDK either. Instead, you can develop a process by using Workbench ES and then have users interact with the process using Workspace ES. This approach enables a LiveCycle ES application to be developed without any programming involved.

As you can see, when creating LiveCycle ES applications, you have many choices. This is what makes LiveCycle ES a very powerful development platform. Before you start developing an application, it is important to plan your application and have a clear understanding of what you want it to do and how you want users to interact with it.

So in conclusion - the next time you encounter the term LiveCycle ES application, know that it can mean many different types of solutions. This is just a tip that hopefully makes your experience with LiveCycle ES a positive one.

There, I said it. Now that we have that out of the way, I thought I’d share a reference that I’ve come to respect over the last year or so.

http://formulate.com.au

I had the good fortune to meet Ms. Enders at the Business Forms Management Association (BFMA) symposium in Las Vegas last year. I was impressed by her presentation on form design techniques, not the least of which because it seemed like a topic that a lot of form design professionals at the symposium were eager to learn more about. In particular, check out Ms. Ender’s articles section (http://formulate.com.au/articles/). There’s a lot of good information in there that I think is worthwhile reading, for experienced form design professionals and newcomers alike.

Design, and design thinking, is really becoming integrated into all facets of business these days, and it only makes sense that it plays a large role in terms of how organizations implement form solutions. How best to capture user data, I learned at the symposium, is not something that is always well understood. Contemporary research into user behaviors and more effective design is often overlooked by form solutions, which really means that the poor individual who must fill out the form -- sometimes called a “customer” -- is left to suffer. Then, of course, it’s the organization that suffers through additional costs and inefficiencies associated with data entry errors.

Ms. Enders is just one of a number of people out there who are bringing some formal design principles and research to the form design space. If you have links to other sources that you have found useful, please comment directly to this blog and share. We’re always curious to know who our readers are reading, and I’m sure other readers would be interested to know as well.

Have a good day.

LiveCycle ContentSpace ES is based on Alfresco 2.1 and offers full Alfresco functionality*, plus LiveCycle Content Services ES. Adobe added more service capabilities by extensively customizing the Alfresco user interface and by integrating various LiveCycle Content Services ES solution components.

Technically speaking, these are the key differences between Alfresco Enterprise Edition and LiveCycle Content Services ES:
- Web Content Management is not embedded or distributed.
- Replaced jBPM with LiveCycle Process Management ES.
- Replaced PDF libraries.
- Enhanced security to enable single sign-on (SSO) with other LiveCycle components such as Workspace and integration with Adobe User Management.
- Added support for the full LiveCycle ES 54 platform matrix including clustering/failover.
- Integrated LiveCycle ES solution components such as LiveCycle Workspace ES, LiveCycle Rights Management ES, and LiveCycle PDF Generator ES.

The key architecture of Alfresco in terms of Java APIs, ACPs, customized content models, actions, and so forth, are the same.

Using LiveCycle Contentspace ES, end users can manage the content through library services such as versioning, check-in/checkout, rights protecting, and archiving according to policies. Developers can also implement processes to enable end users to interact with content and automate procedures like document transformation and PDF generation, rights management, as well as workflows like data capture, and document review and approval.

Along with the Alfresco content management system capabilities, LiveCycle Content Services ES provides the following functionality.

Process automation

Content Services ES can leverage LiveCycle ES for business events by running processes based on content events, such as adding new documents to the repository. A process can also wait for content events to occur, such as a completed document review.

Users can perform the following tasks:
- Attach files, such as reports to a form, and submit the form. After the form is submitted, both the data and the attachments are saved, and can be opened and viewed in the same form layout.
- Access different form applications or content types in the same portal.
- Search and browse by association between processes and documents, and by process and document attributes.

Process initiation

Developers can run processes from LiveCycle Contentspace ES and leverage LiveCycle Workspace ES to review and approve content.

Form rendering

Developers can set up the following form rendering tasks:
- Pre-populate forms by using content or metadata.
- Render forms with attachments from Content Services ES.
- Update forms with a new version of assets referenced during run-time.
- Keep form template versions consistent during the life cycle of the process.

Information protection

Content Services ES can leverage LiveCycle Rights Management ES to automatically apply policies to content that is stored in the repository. Using Rights Management ES, organizations can protect PDF documents. The policies are applied transparently to content when users retrieve content from the repository and save it on the local file system, send content by email to someone who is external to the organization, or place content on devices such as USB keys.

Document output

Content Services ES has pre-built actions that developers can use to automatically convert documents to other formats (for example, from MS Word to PDF). Also, developers can configure actions to start short-lived processes for assembling a set of documents within a shared space into a package, generating PDF files from three-dimensional content, or converting content to PDF/A format for archiving.

* LiveCycle Contentspace ES does not utilize the Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) file server configuration capabilities of Alfresco.

Other LiveCycle ES teams (like Adobe Support) also publish tech notes. You can search the Knowledge Base for a complete list of tech notes that were published within the last few months.

Note: The PDF Generator ES IPP Client is only supported on 32-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista.

Here are the steps required to get this feature working:
1. Install and configure LiveCycle PDG Generator ES.
2. Log into LiveCycle Administration Console, click Services > Applications and Services > Service Management, and find provider.email_sendmail_service. Click the service name and ensure that the Configuration tab is filled correctly. This is where you specify the information that LiveCycle uses to send the email messages.
3. Ensure that your users are configured with a valid email address in the LiveCycle database and assign the PDFGUserPermission to each user. (See Managing Users and Groups and Managing Roles in the LiveCycle User Management Help.)
4. Install and configure the print driver on your users’ computers. For instructions on installing the print driver, see “Installing the IPP client” in your LiveCycle Installing and Deploying guide (such as Installing and Deploying LiveCycle ES for JBoss).