After installing LiveCycle ES, there are a number of URLs that you use to access various LiveCycle ES web applications. Here's a cheat sheet for those URLs.
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Earlier this week, Adobe launched the Adobe Flash Builder 4 beta program. Flash Builder 4, which is the next evolution of Adobe Flex Builder, includes a long list of feature improvements, new data-centric development features, and a new design-develop workflow with the new Adobe Flash Catalyst.
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Creating human-centric processes for LiveCycle Workspace ES can be tricky when you want to include operations from Signatures, Encryption, Rights Management, and Reader Extensions services in your process. There are a few technology nuances that can make it seem more difficult to configure human-centric applications than it should be. New to our LiveCycle ES 8.2 documentation set, is a guide on helping experienced developers understand recommended techniques for creating human-centric processes. These techniques include best practices, tips, and references to existing LiveCycle ES documentation. This new guide, Techniques for Configuring Applications for LiveCycle Workspace ES, can help you to design processes to meet your business requirements and provide an optimal experience for your Workspace ES users.
You know those notes that can be added to tasks using Workspace ES? (If you don’t, you can take a look at Working with notes and attachments). The Workbench ES help explains how to retrieve those notes as a document value after the form is submitted, but (believe it or not) the help leaves out a few details about how to reference the information in those notes.
In Livecycle Workspace ES, a user can request access to another user's (say Alex Pink's) task queue. This initiates a queue sharing process and a Share Queue Request form appears in the Alex’s To Do list. The Share Queue Request form is a Flex application provided with LiveCycle Process Management ES and is available in LiveCycle Workbench ES in the queuesharing.swf file.
In earlier releases of LiveCycle ES, the source code for the Share Queue Request form was not provided with the rest of the LiveCycle Workspace ES source code, therefore, if you localized Workspace ES to another language, such as Spanish, the Share Queue Request form would still appear in English. In LiveCycle ES Update 1 SP 1 (8.2.1.1), the source code for the Share Queue Request form is now available in the LiveCycle ES SDK so that you can localize it. However, before you can localize the for, you you must configure your development environment for customizing Workspace ES as described in Customizing the LiveCycle Workspace ES User Interface and complete the localization customization.
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What is a form guide?
A form guide is a wizard based in Adobe Flash that you can create as an alternative method for your users to enter data onto your form. A user is literally guided through the data entry process, which helps to reduce entry errors by limiting the amount of information presented to the user at any given moment. So instead of seeing a mass of fields and text – because the powers that be demand that you cram as much as possible onto that one sheet of 8.5” x 11” – the user sees chunks of information with animated transitions to move them from one chunk to another. It makes filling out forms feel less like, well, filling out forms.
Click here to see what a form guide looks like.
Note: To view form guides you must have Adobe Flash Player 9 or later installed.
Why would I want to use a form guide?
There are lots of reasons why you might want to use form guides, but here’s an example modeled on a real world case. The following image is of an immunization form.
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The requirements of the form stipulated that users can print and fold it into a booklet in which medical staff could then manually write records of immunizations for a particular patient. Somewhere along the way someone decided it might be nice to also make the same form available in electronic format, but the user should print and fold the form after entering the data. Given this situation, you could create two separate forms, or you could go 21st century and make a form guide. The image below shows the form guide created for the immunization form. As you can see it’s a lot nicer than having to rotate your head ninety degrees every so often.
How do you create form guides?
You create form guides using Guide Builder, a tool available in LiveCycle Designer ES. As it turns out this is a handy arrangement because you create form guides from form designs, which are also created in LiveCycle Designer ES. Once you create a form guide for a particular form design, the form guide definition is actually saved inside the form design itself.
If you want to view a form guide as if you were the user doing the data entry, you can preview it right in Guide Builder. However, when you want to actually deploy a form guide to users, you will need to either:
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You can find a bunch of information about form guides in our product documentation. Check out the links below:
Have fun creating your own form guides. Drop us a note to tell us about your experiences.
Did you know that you can use LiveCycle Workspace ES to interact with processes that involve users set in LiveCycle ES? Workspace ES is an RIA (Rich Internet Application) that comes with Process Management ES and allows end users to participate in and start processes that you developed. They can also search for processes using provided search templates and see custom messages in the Workspace ES banner. The search templates and banner messages are set by you as the Workspace ES administrator.
For example, Tony Blue, who is a client of Insur@nce Corp, needs to submit an insurance claim. The insurance claim he submits in Workspace ES automatically gets routed to insurance agents at an insurance company. The application form might be provided as a form guide, which is a Flash-based form that provides an easier experience for filling out the details. After the form is completed and submitted, it gets routed to the agents, where the form might be displayed as a PDF. There can be business logic set in the process so that certain types of applications are routed to different insurance agents. Since there can be many agents at the insurance company, who can get hundreds of applications a day, their list of applications to review can be managed using individual or team queues. Workspace ES also allows the agents to share their queue with each other to balance the workload or re-route applications when they are out of the office. Below is what Tony sees when he fills out his claim:
To see a larger image, click here
Before automating your business process for use in Workspace ES, you must design a form and a process In LiveCycle Designer ES, you design the form, which displays and captures information from users involved in the process. The form can be displayed in PDF, HTML, or as a form guide. You can also design the form in Flex Builder or the Flex SDK. Flex forms can provide an enriched experience that transcends traditional forms designed in Designer ES. In LiveCycle Workbench ES, you design the process map, which is a graphical representation of your business process. You can configure the process map with business rules, inputs, and outputs.
After designing your form and process map, you configure your automated business process for use in the LiveCycle Administration Console by setting the process to be started from Workspace ES.
Since Workspace ES comes out-of-the-box, you may want to customize it for your organization. You can rebrand it with your own colors and images or you can build your own RIA using pieces of the Workspace ES User interface and components from the Workspace ES API.
