Mike Potter

I'll likely target beginner to intermediate LiveCycle Designer developers. I was thinking on the weekend that I should also give the opportunity to other developers, perhaps more advanced than I, to present at these sessions.

Can you clarify how you split up a developer and an end user?

Mike

- Can you clarify how you split up a developer and an end user? -
Thanks for getting back on this one.

I'd describe these end users as people who (in e.g. a MS Office context) are comfortable with Excel functions, and who maybe get as far as creating non-complex relational databases using Access). In other words, those useful people in any company who aren't total tech obsessives, but on the other hand know more than the average Excel user.

When you show them AD, they really like it - probably because of the drag-drop UI, the time-saving object libraries etc. Very few form creation apps are as slick, and of course none offer out-of-the-box data submission via Reader.

And the basics of Designer are pretty easy for them to pick up; however they don't intend or want to get involved with Dev work (they aren't paid or have the time to be developers) - they limit themselves to FormCalc rather than JS, and think that SOAP is something you wash with...

A couple of seminars or similar on 'tricky' subjects for those users - I'm thinking Dynamic forms and Patterns (my bugbears) for example - would be useful in getting people past frustrating blocks. You may not get a huge audience for the first one, but having them as an archived webcast or something would be very useful.

I'm sure you folks have your hands full concentrating on developers needs, and may not have the wo/manpower available to deal with non-dev people.

IMHO though, Designer and the LC / Reader enablement concept is attractive enough for Adobe to win a much larger market share than they have at the moment, if only they provide the support that end users need to get their forms up and running.

Imagine a typical situation in a corporate office - a small but efficient workgroup need a form solution. They can't wait two years for Head Office to dream up a company wide solution and so experiment with the retail version of Acrobat/Designer. And maybe the shiny Adobe rep has not yet even found time to visit Head Office to let them know about LC etc.
So, they find it easy(-ish) to use Designer and PDF forms take off, both internally and externally.
Word gets round - as it always does - and Head Office take a look. And end up buying into the LC Forms concept for the whole company.

I think that this 'bottom up practical recommendation' is more likely to lead to fast take up than Adobe concentrating soley on 'selling' to Head Office IS Managers etc., as seems to be the case at present.

Designer may be a 'LC' product, but its ability to work stand-alone as well as with Forms server means that it is ideally placed to hook uninitiated large firms and corporates into the PDF Forms, Reader enablement and ultimately LC concept. Adobe should throw as much money as they can at supporting and advertising it.

Incidentally, website info on Designer has improved tremendously over the past year - thanks! - so hopefully the More, More, More request is not too disheartening. :O)

Mike,

This is a great idea, and would be even better if you do save the sessions for later access.

Being based in Sydney, Australia, we tend to find most activity of this kind is based on timezones not quite practical for our access.
So having an area where we could access them in both short and long term would be great.

Topics we'd love to see initially incude (in addition to those already mentioned) differences between versions and in particular differences between Reader 6 and 7 abilities. And following that, how to code to cater for this problem. (E.g. ExecValidate apparently was brought in in version 7.1 or Reader - how do we make it also work in Reader 6 and up?)

- Sanna