Hand-picked user assistance content from the LiveCycle community
General
Understanding MEAP – Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms
0MEAP’s are going to be the new *aaS. If you don’t understand that statement, consider yourself blessed. Understanding technology industry analysts and acronyms is a difficult task. A relatively new category of Gartner Magic Quadrants have emerged one one in particular is a category that we think deserves a lot of attention. Mobile Enterprise Application Platformsare not typical software like your daddy used to buy. MEAP’s are collections of services and components (including frameworks, profiles, libraries and more) that facilitate the types of functionality required to develop and maintain applications running on wireless devices (aka mobile devices).Now I don’t subscribe to hype and BS and neither should you. As the former chair of the OASIS Service Oriented Architecture Technical Committee, the group that produced the standard reference model for SOA, I never anticipated that people would run with this and start all these (INSERT ANY CAPITAL LETTER FROM THE ALPHABET HERE)aaS. Software as a Service (SaaS) is not really that different from hosted solutions is it? If you disagree, you’d better hurry and claim one while there are still letters left for acronyms. I think XaaS is not used yet.
When I see value though, I want to point it out. MEAP is one of those rare acronyms that seems to be vastly underestimated by the majority of the industry. The term itself seems to have come from Analyst firm Gartner in a paper published in April 2011 (Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms, Michael J. King, William Clark). I believe I read somewhere that Gartner believes over 95% of the technology industry will use some form of MEAP by 2012. When I try to research this topic on Google, very little information comes up. Regardless of the title, let’s explore what a MEAP is and what it does.
In their paper, “The rule of three” is used as a quantifier for identifying when this functionality might be of interest. Quoting from Gartner (via Wikipedia):
The Rule of Three refers to a concept developed by analyst firm Gartner, whereby companies are encouraged to consider the MEAP approach to mobility when they need their mobile solutions to:
- Support three or more mobile applications
- Support three or more mobile operating systems (OS)
- Integrate with at least three back-end data sources
According to Gartner, using a common mobility platform, like a MEAP, brings considerable savings and strategic advantages in this situation.
——-
Read the full article at http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2012/02/understanding-meap-mobile-enterprise.html.
ADEP/LiveCycle v10 SP1 Now Available
0472 days
- Neal Davies
I’m pleased to announce that the first service pack for ADEP/LiveCycle v10 is now available. It is made up of two parts; Document Services SP1 for the LiveCycle Modules (Forms, Output, Reader Extensions, Process management …) and Experience Services SP1 … Continue reading →
——-
Complete article at http://blogs.adobe.com/ADEP/2011/12/adeplivecycle-v10-sp1-now-available.html.
The Future of LiveCycle
0473 days
- Arun Anantharaman
Since Adobe announced its increased focus on Digital Marketing and Digital Media, the LiveCycle team has met with dozens of customers and partners to discuss the future of LiveCycle. They are all passionate about our technology and the solutions we …
——-
Read the full article at http://blogs.adobe.com/ADEP/2012/01/the-future-of-livecycle.html.
Security misconceptions – Watermarks, Usage Rights and Rights Management
0488 days
-Tai
There is a confusion about what features of Acrobat and PDFs in general offer by way of securing documents. I would like to do a very cursory overview of the items that I have so far seen users consider “security.”
To be clear, by “security” I mean the ability or inability to access the contents of the PDF, thus safeguarding information from entering the wrong hands.
1) Not Security-Oriented
a) Watermarks
Unlike on your Dollar, Euro or Pound notes (etc), the watermark is NOT a guarantee of integrity, veracity or anything at all.
In the PDF world, a visible watermark only exists as a notification mechanism. If a watermark says “Confidential,” it is only warning the viewer that the content is confidential, but will not otherwise try to make itself indelible.
It is meant to be a very visible mark on the page, with the added property of not completely obfuscation the items underneath (allowing readability to be maintained)
b) Certification
A Certified PDF carries a digital signature certifying that certain things can and cannot be done with it. Namely:
-A PDF certified to run privileged scripts can run scripts requiring special privileges, such as writing to the hard drive.
-A PDF certified to be unmodified means that so long as the PDF has been modified withing given parameters (fields filled in for example), then the certification will hold. If a visual aspect of the PDF changes though, the certification will be broken, and Acrobat will report an error.
Certification covers a number of other use cases as well, but I hope the above illustrates sufficiently why this is a not a security-related item, rather a usability concern.
c) Reader Extensions Usage Rights
Acrobat and LiveCycle can extend the usability of PDFs to Adobe Reader, the free PDF viewing application. By extending usability features, you can allow Reader users to fill in forms and save that content, add comment annotation, and other functionality.
However, if the same extended form is opened in Acrobat, the user can do to the PDF pretty much anything that Acrobat has at its disposition.
REUR adds functionality to Reader. Any extra functionality it does not add is a restriction that Reader already had.
2) Security-Oriented
a) Password Protection
Using password protection, you can encrypt the PDF so it can only be opened by a person who has the password. You can also prevent the PDF from being used in certain ways, such as modifying the pages.
You cannot however track who has opened the PDF, when and at what IP. That is the domain of Rights Management.
b) LiveCycle Rights Management (aka Policy Server)
LiveCycle 7 introduced Policy Server, later renamed to LiveCycle Rights Management. Adobe LiveCycle/ADEP Rights Management protects your documents from being accessed by parties you have not authorized to do so.
This allows the document publisher to:
-protect with a user ID/password combination
-force the identification to go to a remote server
-restrict usage rights depending on the user’s group
……………..
Read the full article at http://blogs.adobe.com/an_tai/archives/176.
Flex is Alive!
0- Holly Schinsky
Flex folks, first of all, today there’s a new official statement out on the Adobe website about Adobe’s commitments to the Flash Platform including plans for Flex that you should be aware of. Secondly there’s a new post from the Product Management team out now summarizing the recent Flex Q&A. There’s been a lot of frustration in the community (which I understand and can personally relate to having been part of the community myself for a very long time) and I wish that the sequence of events (and frankly the communication) did not happen as it did, but it is what it is at this point and we need to carry on. I hope people can see this move of Flex to an Apache model with dedicated full-time engineering resources in San Francisco as the good news that it is!! Flex is alive and well and will continue to grow as the dust settles. Even now we can build amazing applications over many other technologies in half the amount of time with it in its current state. And the growth in Flex and AIR for mobile is allowing us to do some super cool and fun stuff which is about to just get better with the upcoming release of Flex 4.6 in a couple weeks!
I realize people’s trust is tarnished and people are scorned and angry, but please try to remove your emotions from the equation and look at this for what it is. Any good developer knows that technology is ever-changing and you have to ride the current wave. It’s evident that HTML 5/JavaScript is gaining ground and needs to be kept on our radar of things to be learning (whether we love it or not). It should also be considered as an option right now for certain applications where it makes more sense. As much as I am passionate about Flex myself, it can be overkill for many applications. And what better way to refine our skills in the HTML/JS arena by actually building some apps to gain the experience. As we all know though, there are still a ton of applications where it makes more sense to use Flex (enterprise and many mobile AIR apps) and fortunately we still have that option!
I know many of you are having to answer some tough questions from your clients and management about all of this, I hope today’s statements can help in that respect. If there was a way I could change how things happened myself or wave a magic do-over wand I would in a heartbeat 
. This has not been easy for any of us. I just hope we can now start channeling our frustrations into something more positive and productive and get back to having some fun!
I will continue to post any updates on the move to Apache as I find out. Start thinking about how you might be able to contribute 
!
——-
Original article at http://devgirl.org/2011/11/17/flex-is-alive/.
The Future of Adobe LiveCycle
1- Kevin Schmidt
With all the Adobe news lately, I wanted to make sure everyone knew the future of Adobe LiveCycle. Here is the statement from Arun Anantharaman, vice president and general manager, LiveCycle and Adobe Connect.
“Since Adobe’s entry into the Enterprise market in 2002 with the acquisition of Ottawa-based Accelio, we have built a large portfolio of LiveCycle customers. We will continue to sell and support our LiveCycle products in the government and financial services markets, two areas where the LiveCycle value proposition remains especially strong. Outside of those markets, we are now planning to focus our Enterprise efforts on products targeting the digital marketer, including the Digital Marketing Suite and Web Experience Management solution. In addition, Adobe is fully committed to the success and satisfaction of our customers and we intend to build long term strategic relationships with them. We will continue to support all existing and future customers of our solutions.”
So, there you have it, feel free to ask any questions in the comments and I will do my best to get them answered for you.
——-
Original article at http://www.underprise.com/2011/11/11/the-future-of-adobe-livecycle/.
Updated Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) Help Content!
0570 days
- Gilbert Yu
As part of our continuous effort to make the help content better for you, we have recently updated the following help:
- New section for installing the Experience Server as a Windows service.
- New section about the ADEP Client Component Framework.
NOTE: Be sure to update any cached local copies of the PDF versions you have on your computer.
Please continue to help us improve the ADEP help content by adding feedback at ADEP documentation site. We appreciate the comments you have provided so far!
——-
Original article at http://blogs.adobe.com/ADEPhelp/2011/10/updated-adobe-digital-enterprise-platform-adep-help-content.html.
Quick Tip: CSS to customize the TabbedViewNavigator and ActionBar in Flex Mobile Applications
0586 days
If you are building Flex Mobile applications on of the first things you will end up wanting to change is the default look of the TabbedViewNavigator and ActionBar! This can be done through skinning but for simple changes it can be done much quicker with CSS. The CSS below illustrates how to do this.
@namespace s "library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark";
s|TabbedViewNavigator #tabBar {
chromeColor:#028bba;
}
s|ActionBar
{
chromeColor: #028bba;
fontSize: 28;
fontWeight: bold;
}
Save the file as a CSS file and include it in the Flex Mobile application using MXML
<fx:Style source="file_name.css" />
This is the CSS that I used for mapi and ends up looking like this:
All the CSS properties for both the TabbedViewNavigator and ActionBar can be found here:
A general article on Styling and Themes can be found here: Styles and themes
——-
Original article at http://www.underprise.com/2011/09/22/quick-tip-css-to-customize-the-tabbedviewnavigator-and-actionbar-in-flex-mobile-applications/.
Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform
0604 days
There are two new announcements from Adobe that are the most exciting products I have ever seen us release. Flash Builder 4.5.1 brings a new model for portable development for mobile, meaning you can use a large portion of the same code base for desktop, laptop, tablet and smart phone targets. This tool along with the Flex 4.5.1 framework is a complete game changer.Flash Builder 4.5.1 outputs applications for Android, RIM PlayBook, and Apple iOS devices, including the i(Devices). All of us have been busy writing several applications and will roll some out in the coming weeks as well as leading a large hands-on mega lab at Adobe MAX this October in Los Angeles, CA. Last year, two instances of this class sold out in advance so if you want to immerse yourself in mobile development, strongly consider reserving your spot ASAP. Several other evangelists from Adobe including Greg Wilson, Michael Chaize, Ryan Stewart, Kevin Hoyt, Serge Jespers, Ben Forta, Mihai Corlan, Anne Kathrine Petteroe, Mike Jones, Paul Trani and more will be diving deep into all the subjects. See the blog roll for a list of all evangelists.
We are also introducing the new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP), which embodies multiple functionalities formerly offered by Adobe LiveCycle ES, Day Software, and more. ADEP is a bold platform, which solves a major issue emerging in modern enterprise architecture. The architectural discipline of Customer Experience Management (CEM) is important for modern enterprises to grasp and act upon. CEM is described from an architectural perspective within the blog post and video here.
ADEP offers customers many choices (such as HTML5 or SWF), which I believe is best decided on a per requirements basis. A further explanation from the Adobe website reveals some of the problems ADEP solves:
“Companies that want to differentiate themselves from the competition realize that they must deliver applications that engage customers as they access information and interact with the business and its frontline employees. And customers want access on
any device or across any channel. Central to accomplishing that goal is simple, yet engaging, interfaces that enable customers to access information and processes, even if they are contained in corporate systems. Efforts to merely extend access to such systems have not proven successful due to the complexity of user interfaces that have been designed for specialists, not customers and the frontline employees who serve them.”
The obvious enrichment a platform can deliver is a common pipeline for data and processing, designed from the bottom up with Cloud and Social Media DNA. The data modeling capabilities also offer enterprise developers some really cool new features.
Over the next few weeks we will continue to post articles to expose bits of the platform and explain what it means in terms of existing LiveCycle ES customers.
Hope to see you at Adobe MAX 2011!
Original post at http://technoracle.blogspot.com
——-
Original article at http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2011/06/adobe-digital-enterprise-platform.html.
ADEP Architecture Principles and Choices Whitepaper
0608 days
Craig Randall, Chief Architect of Customer Experience Management has just released a whitepaper entitled “The Adobe® Digital Enterprise Platform: Architectural principles and choices”. The document is available from the Adobe Digital Enterprise Developer Center. In it, Craig describes the principles behind the design of … Continue reading →
——-
Original article at http://blogs.adobe.com/ADEP/2011/09/adep-architecture-principles-and-choices-whitepaper.html.
