Mike Potter

November 15, 2006

Adobe Policy Server as a hosted service

Yesterday Adobe launched the Adobe Document Center, which allows you to limit access to PDF, Word and Excel files.  The application was written in Adobe Flex, and provides the ability to control who has access to your documents (including whether or not they can copy or print the document), and track who has done what to your documents.  The Document Center is available as a free trial under the end of the year (same timeline as the free trial for Acrobat Connect).  (Press release available here).

The online service mimics the functionality available in Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server, which was also updated today to include the ability to protect Word, Excel and Dassault Systemes CATIA v5 files.  You can read the press release online.

technorati tags:adobe, livecycle, flex, onlineservices, policyserver

October 13, 2006

Try Adobe LiveCycle Software for Free

Today we have opened up access to two major parts of the LiveCycle family. First of all, we have removed a lengthy form that was required to download Adobe LiveCycle Designer. Instead, you can now login with your Adobe ID and download LiveCycle Designer, without having to fill out any form at all.

Secondly, we've opened up access to the Adobe LiveCycle Toolbox, which runs on Windows only, using MySQL as the database and JBoss as the application server. This single download allows you to try Adobe LiveCycle without committing to the $1495 Adobe Enterprise Developer Program (which is still your best bet if you want access to unlimited email based support!). Do you have a business process that you'd like to automate with PDF documents? You've now got free access to the tools that you require to build your solution. When you're ready to move to a staging environment or production, you can contact Adobe for the appropriate licenses required.

In the future we'll be creating more tutorials and getting started guides that will be posted on the Adobe LiveCycle developer center. For now, I think developers pretty well off, with free access to the LiveCycle Toolbox, LiveCycle Designer (trial), XPAAJ, Flex Builder (trial), Flex Data Services, Flex SDK, Flash Media Server (oh, you missed that news?), the Acrobat SDK, and ColdFusion. If I've missed anything, you can probably download it here.

technorati tags:livecycle, adobe, livecycledesigner

October 03, 2006

Adobe XPAAJ SDK updated to include ColdFusion samples

Great news for all you ColdFusion developers.  We have added ColdFusion samples to the XPAAJ SDK.  The work was done by Sterling Ledet, who runs a Adobe training centers across the United States.  Check out his company's site if you're interested in hands-on training for Adobe products, including historical Macromedia products.

What's XPAAJ?  From the developer center page, "its a Java API that helps Java developers to build applications that work with PDF documents and forms. It can extract data from a PDF file programmatically and combine XML data with blank PDF forms. You can incorporate XPAAJ into standalone Java applications or deploy it into either a Web container or an application server container."  We need to add the ColdFusion connection in there now.

Here's the updated .zip file that includes the CFM samples and here's the developer center page that outlines what's included in the .zip file.

Ben Forta has done some preliminary work with XPAAJ as well, you should check out his blog entry on XPAAJ here.

Duane Nickull has XPAAJ working on a MacBook Pro, if you're interested in running XPAAJ on an Intel Mac.

Be aware that in order to use XPAAJ, you need to have an enterprise license of ColdFusion, Flex Data Services or Adobe LiveCycle.  Be sure to read the EULA before downloading the software.

technorati tags:adobe, livecycle, xpaaj, coldfusion

September 22, 2006

LIveCycle Sessions at MAX

Are you a LiveCycle developer, looking for hands on sessions for LiveCycle, a preview of the upcoming LiveCycle 8 release, or wanting to meet Adobe employees on the LiveCycle team?

Or, are you someone who doesn't know much about LiveCycle and are wondering what all the excitement's about.

Either way, I've compiled a list of all the LiveCycle sessions at MAX. There are 11 sessions focussing on LiveCycle, all at different times throughout the week. (This Google Calendar shows you the times and dates of the sessions.)

Adobe MAX continues the tradition of Macromedia MAX conference: providing technical information to developers building solutions with Adobe technologies. While new to LiveCycle developers, I'm sure you won't want to miss this year's event.

As a LiveCycle developer, here are some highlights that you won't want to miss:

1. Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server. The new Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server will be unveiled, showcasing the ability to policy protect Microsoft Word documents, as well as Adobe PDF documents.
2. Meet the team. Matt Butler will be presenting a 3 hour session on LiveCycle, including a 30 minute panel session to allow developers to directly access members of the LiveCycle team and other key people.
3. LiveCycle 8. We'll be previewing LiveCycle 8 and discussing its architecture, showing where technologies like Flex and ColdFusion can fit in.
4. Hands on training. Hands on training for products like Adobe LiveCycle Designer, LiveCycle Forms and LiveCycle Workflow, with members of the LiveCycle team there to answer any questions you may have.

As well, I've pulled out some of the highlights of all the LiveCycle sessions and provided you with links to more info on the sessions below.

Hands on Deployment - Adobe LiveCycle Architecture: Matt Butler from Adobe will discuss the LiveCycle platform, including the architecture for the upcoming LiveCycle 8 release.

Adobe Core Security Architecture:Duane Nickull and Christoph Rooms, both from Adobe, explore the security models in Adobe products.

Adobe LiveCycle Forms: Everything you want to know: Anthony Rumsey from Adobe shows how to use LiveCycle Forms, and also how you can use LiveCycle Forms and Adobe Flex 2 together.

LiveCycle 8: What's coming: Sanga Viswanathan from Adobe previews the next release of LiveCycle.

LiveCycle Core Products, SDKs and APIs: Howard Treisman from Avoka Technologiescovers the LiveCycle products and the SDKs that are available for each.

LiveCycle Designer: Becoming Fluent: Mike Potter from Adobe gives a hands on, introductory course to LiveCycle Designer.

LiveCycle Workflow: Aggregating Resources and Services into Workflows: Christoph Rooms goes into detail on how to take LiveCycle services and form them into workflows. There will also be a deep dive into creating custom QPACs.

Form Submission, Routing, and Retrieval Using Adobe Flex and LiveCycle: Venkata Adidam and Kevin Ku from Adobe discuss a real world implementation of LiveCycle Workflow and its integration with a Flex RIA.

LiveCycle and Flex: Creating Flexible Promotions: David Liao and Pierre van Aswegen from Ensemble Systems show how to use LiveCycle to route customer information from various data sources into a single Flex RIA.

Solutions for Intelligent Dynamic Document Generation and Presentation David Strauss shows how to use Flex and LiveCycle together with a business rules engine to generate cutomzed applications and documents for customers.

Unleashing Digital Assets: Automating Worldwide Franchise Marketing Collateral with ID Server, Flex, and LiveCycle Mark Walter shows how ad agencies use InDesign Server to help their clients worldwide sales channels, and explains the potential role of Adobe LiveCycle within ad agency and marcom applications.

technorati tags:adobe, livecycle, adobemax06

September 18, 2006

LiveCycle Barcoded Forms eSeminars Next Week

All next week, Lee Sutton from Adobe will be hosting free eseminars that discuss Adobe LiveCycle Barcoded Forms.  If you've seen any of my presentations on LiveCycle, you'll know that I think that Barcoded Forms is one of the coolest products in the LiveCycle family.  What Barcoded Forms (and 2-D barcodes in general) allow you to do is to encode all the information in a PDF form into an industry standard, 2-D barcode (the standard is named PDF417, but its not related to Adobe PDF documents), so that when the user snail mails their form back to your organization, the organization only needs to scan the barcode, rather than re-key the data by hand.

If your organization is manually re-keying data sent to you from customers, then you'll want to attend as many of these sessions as possible.

There are 5 sessions next week.  Click on the links to register for the session, as space is limited.

1. Monday, 12:00 Noon ET:  Introduction to LiveCycle Barcoded Forms
2. Tuesday, 12:00 Noon ET: Introduction to Adobe Acrobat and Barcoded Forms
3. Wednesday, 12:00 Noon ET: Introduction to Adobe LiveCycle Designer and Barcoded Forms
4. Thursday, 12:00 Noon ET: Best Practices of Barcoded Forms and PDF417 Barcodes
5. Friday, 12:00 Noon ET: Adobe LiveCycle Barocded Forms and Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions

technorati tags:barcodedforms, livecycle, adobe, eseminars

September 12, 2006

LiveCycle 7.2 Documentation

technorati tags:adobe, livecycle

September 11, 2006

Create PDF from Flex Application using XPAAJ

Zee has just published a new tutorial (using Captivate) showing you how to take data from a Flex application, and then merge this with a PDF template to create a PDF document. This tutorial, part of his series on combining LiveCycle and Flex, uses the XPAAJ library (prounounced "xpage") that is available for use by existing Flex, ColdFusion and LiveCycle customers. The complete source code to his sample is available.

His great tutorial shows how to create a PDF form that will grow or shrink in size, depending on the amount of data that is attached to the form.  You can do this using Adobe LiveCycle Designer (free trial available), which allows you to create dynamic forms that will change based on the amount of data that is bound to the form.

technorati tags:livecycle, pdf, flex, adobe, xpaaj

September 05, 2006

Adobe LiveCycle at MAX - Google Calendar

technorati tags:livecycle, adobemax06, adobe, flex

XPAAJ for Intel Based Macs

Duane Nickull has a great blog post on using XPAAJ with Intel based Macs.  If you're interested in XPAAJ or LiveCycle and work on a Mac, this is a great tutorial for you.

technorati tags:livecycle, adobe, xpaaj

August 18, 2006

Great new tutorial for LiveCycle Forms

If you're interested in LiveCycle and seeing what its capable of, Zee at Flexlive.net has a great new tutorial showing you the power of LiveCycle Forms.  The tutorial and sample code show how to bind XML data to a PDF form.  Its a fairly simple example, and for now requires the LiveCycle Forms product, however I think you can do something similar with the XPAAJ library, which is available for use for Adobe enterprise customers - owners of LiveCycle, ColdFusion or Flex enterprise licenses. 

One thing to keep in mind while you watch the tutorial: what Zee is not showing there is the fact that the PDF form can grow or shrink in size depending on the content that you send to it.  I'm not sure that the example shows the power of LiveCycle and PDF forms.  But, if you think about areas where you need a PDF printed document that grows or shrinks depending on the content (an invoice for example), then you begin to understand the power of LiveCycle and PDF form technology.

technorati tags:adobe, livecycle, xpaaj, pdfform

August 10, 2006

Interested in LiveCycle? Check out this intro to LiveCycle Designer

technorati tags:livecycle, flex, adobe

July 20, 2006

Why Flex developers should love XPAAJ

As I posted the other day, we recently opened up access to the XPAAJ library to anyone, without requiring a membership to the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program. We're working on creating tutorials on how to get started with XPAAJ, and why its so useful to developers. Here's the first XPAAJ tutorial that we're working on, please provide comments on it in this blog.

Flex developers should love XPAAJ, because it allows you to take the data from your Flex application and put it into a document of record. Create a sweet looking application in Flex, allowing the user to enter and manipulate data online. When its time to take that information offline, or provide them with a document of record for their data, use XPAAJ to populate a dynamic PDF form (that you created with LiveCycle Designer - free trial here) that contains all their information. Users can then interact with that document through Adobe Reader, without having to be connected online.

At that point, you can do all sorts of things with the PDF document. Want to control who can open or print it? Use LiveCycle Policy Server. Want to allow them to comment on the document with Adobe Reader? Use LiveCycle Reader Extensions. Want to allow them to add their digital signatures to the document? Use LiveCycle Document Security. Need an overview of all the LiveCycle products? Watch my Adobe developer week presentation.

Want to try LiveCycle? Get the LiveCycle Toolbox. Want access to the LiveCycle Toolbox, without an Adobe Enterprise Developer Program membership? Email me by commenting in this blog.

technorati tags:livecycle, xpaaj, flex, pdf, adobe

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July 18, 2006

Download XPAAJ without AEDP membership

I'm happy to announce that today we've opened up access to the XPAAJ (XML PDF Access APIs for Java) library. You no longer need to be a member of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program to download XPAAJ. You can download XPAAJ simply by creating an Adobe ID, which you already have if you've downloaded something from Adobe.

XPAAJ allows you to pre-populate and extract form data from Adobe PDF forms (created with LiveCycle Designer), using Java code. The XPAAJ download includes a getting started guide and a developer guide to help you build out Java applications.

A few things to note in the license for XPAAJ: (see section 2. LICENSE in the software license agreement):

1. You can use the software if you own a copy of Adobe Enterprise software (defined as commercially available versions of Adobe software branded as LiveCycle, ColdFusion or Flex), and you may only use it for your own internal business purpose. OR
2. You can use the software to develop programs to extract data from PDF files delivered to you from a licensed copy of LiveCycle Forms or Reader Extensions.

Download the XPAAJ SDK here.

Ben Forta should have some good news for ColdFusion developers in the near future.

technorati tags:xpaaj, livecycle, adobe, coldfusion, java, pdf

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Blogging about Flex and LiveCycle

technorati tags:livecycle, flex, adobe, sunone

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July 10, 2006

More Information on Adobe MAX Posted - Including Registration Form

We've announced more information about Adobe MAX, including details on all the sessions that will be taking place during the conference. Here's the press release, here's the agenda, here's the list of tracks and here's the registration form.

If you're developing software or solutions with Adobe software, then you'll want to attend.  There are sessions on Acrobat and Breeze, LiveCycle, Mobile, RIAs, Web Design and Development and more.

Also announced are the 2006 MAX Awards, which will "honor the most effective and compelling customer work in eight categories: achievement (high return on investment); advertising and branding; industry innovator; interactive process management; media and entertainment; mobile and devices; rich Internet applications and Web development; and training and collaboration."  Adobe will accept submissions starting on July 17th, entries must be submitted by September 1st.  I'm not sure where you can submit your entries, but a list of last year's finalists is available online.

If you're blogging about this, please tag your posts "adobemax06" in Technorati.  We'll use that same tag for Flickr photos of the event.

technorati tags:adobemax06, acrobat, livecycle, flex, ria, conferences, adobe

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July 07, 2006

LiveCycle, PDF and Open Source

A few blog entries ago, I explained why I thought the release of Flex was good for open source developers.  One of the comments, from Will Pollard, asked for clarification on how LiveCycle fits with Flex and open source.  In particular, why would someone use LiveCycle as opposed to any of the free PDF creation tools that are out there. 

To start with, LiveCycle is a bit more difficult to access than Flex... Unlike Flex, you cannot download trial versions of the Adobe LiveCycle server products.  (You can download a trial version Adobe LiveCycle Designer and start building out PDF forms.)  Currently you need to be a member of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program to download the LiveCycle software, including the very easy to setup LiveCycle Toolbox.  (The toolbox is a pre-confirued install of all the LiveCycle software.  For an explanation of LiveCycle, check out this Breeze presenation I did for Adobe Developer Week.)

We do want to make LiveCycle more accessible to developers.

To understand how LiveCycle competes with open source PDF creation tools, its important to understand that there are two types of PDF documents: what I call static PDF documents and dynamic PDF documents.  Static forms are created in Acrobat, and are sometimes referred to as "AcroForms".  The PDF file is static (it does not grow or shrink in size), but in Acrobat or Adobe Reader it may contain interactive elements that people can fill out electronically.  For example, if you had an invoice, you would create the template with a set number of rows, and then hope that someone didn't order more items than the number of rows on the document.

On the other hand, dynamic PDF forms can grow or shrink in size depending on the data that is bound to the form.  So, say you have an invoice for products, it could be 1 page for 1 customer, and 10 pages for another customer who orders a lot of items.  To build that, you use LiveCycle Designer and create a PDF form, then use LiveCycle Forms to bind the data (likely in XML format) to the form.  Most of the free, open source tools out there do not handle this type of PDF document.  In fact, I haven't seen any solutions that do this, other than the Adobe LiveCycle set of products.

So, the question now becomes how does Flex fit into this?  The idea is that you would use a Flex front end to gather data, likely on a website.  At some point, you may want to continue filling in the form offline, or send the data to other people.  When the time comes to take that data offline, you pass the data to a PDF form (which was created with LiveCycle Designer), and then users are able to access that data in a PDF document.  They can send it to friends, do offline collaboration etc... When the time comes to send the data back to the organization's servers, a user would hit the submit button in the form and the data would be sent back to LiveCycle Forms, which will extract the data from the PDF form and allow the organization to process the data.

Once the data is in the PDF form, there are other LiveCycle pieces that may be of use as well.  Digital signatures, policy protecting that information, managing the form's workflow are all services that the LiveCycle set of products provides.  In the above example, I've focused only on taking the data off line, but once it is off line, the other LiveCycle products add additional functionality to the document / form.

technorati tags:livecycle, adobe, opensource, acrobat, flex

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July 06, 2006

Adobe Developer Week Recorded Sessions

In case you missed the sessions we had during Adobe Developer Week, they've all been recorded.  There's information on Adobe Apollo, LiveCycle, Flex, ColdFusion, Flex and LiveCycle, security, Ajax, and more.  Check them out at your leisure.

technorati tags:apollo, adobe, livecycle, ajax, flex2, coldfusion

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June 13, 2006

LiveCycle Developer Week Recorded Session

I presented an introduction to Adobe LiveCycle yesterday as the third event in our week long, online Developer Week event. It was really nerve racking presenting online to over 250 people... I would much prefer to present to that many people in person... At least then you can see people's faces, and see if they understand what you're talking about: are they nodding their heads or falling asleep? You can't see anything in Breeze, except a bunch of questions flying by all the time.

If you missed it, then you're welcome to take a look at the recorded session. I went through an overview of all the LiveCycle products, including a demo of Designer. Unfortunately, my demo of LiveCycle Workflow and the server products didn't work out as I had problems starting up the LiveCycle server software, but I hope to have a Captivate movie on getting started with LiveCycle up on my blog later this week.

If you're interested in LiveCycle, then I suggest you check out the other LiveCycle sessions this week: an Introduction to Adobe LiveCycle Workflow and QPAC Development, and Building Applications Using Adobe LiveCycle and Flex. Register online here.

May 15, 2006

LiveCycle Developer Toolbox Released, Again

Today we released the Adobe LiveCycle Developer Toolbox today. For those of you who have been following my blog or Adobe LiveCycle, then you'll know that this is the second time that we've released this. I think this time its up to stay. :) Last time we had some problems with the toolbox, which we've now fixed, so if you installed the last one, you should install this one instead.

If you're at all interested in LiveCycle, then this is really important for you. This one file allows you to extract a completely pre-configured setup of LiveCycle, which historically has been more difficult than we would have liked. We do plan on updating the toolbox on a regular basis, in step with updates to LiveCycle software. If you've got a proof of concept type application that you want to get up and running quickly, the toolbox is your best bet.

You do need to be a member of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program to download and run the developer toolbox. Membership is available in the Adobe online store for $1495 per year or 1450 euros, depending on your location.

May 02, 2006

A Final Reminder - Learn More About LiveCycle 7.1

We're all set to go for tomorrow's online session with Product Managers from LiveCycle Print, Forms and Designer. They'll go over some of the changes in LiveCycle 7.1, including product and performance enhancements, and then answer your questions. The session should last between one hour and an hour and a half. The URL to join the session is adobe.breezecentral.com/r90735129/ Feel free to join that about 15 minutes before the session starts, which is at 12:00 Noon ET tomorrow. The session will also be recorded, so you can watch it at a later time, if time doesn't allow you to join us live. If you have any questions you want to ask, but can't make it, feel free to leave them as comments in this blog.

May 01, 2006

New Adobe LiveCycle Developer Center

Today the web team took the wraps off of the new Adobe.com, but more importantly to LiveCycle developers was the new Adobe LiveCycle Developer Center page.

There were some major changes that we made for this new website. First of all, the product specific developer centers are all gone, replaced by one overall LiveCycle Developer Center. This better reflects our current product strategy and future vision. Many of you are building solutions with LiveCycle Workflow, and integrating the various LiveCycle pieces into that overall application. It was confusing to know whether to go to the LiveCycle Workflow developer center for information on Workflow and say LiveCycle Forms, or just go to the LiveCycle Forms developer center. Plus, you had to check out two pages to see what new content had been posted. Now, one simple page will get you all the information about all the LiveCycle software, which should make things much easier to find.

As we have over the past 3 months, the page will continue to be updated every week, hopefully on Monday mornings, so visit it regularly if you haven't been.

Some things still need to be worked on. For example, we haven't tied assets from the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program to "Your Account" on the top of each page. That will take a bit more work.

However, overall, I think this is a big plus for LiveCycle developers, and I'm anxious to hear your comments.

If you have questions about the overall Adobe developer center changes, this FAQ from Craig Goodman may help you. Jonathan Wall also gives a great overview of Adobe's developer community, including events that we're hosting or attending, how to engage our team etc... in this article.

April 20, 2006

Reminder about LiveCycle 7.1 Overview Session

Just a reminder that if you're interested in learning more about Adobe LiveCycle Designer, Forms and Print 7.1, we're hosting an online Breeze meeting on May 3rd, at 12:00 Noon Eastern. The session will be held online, and will give an overview of changes in LiveCycle Designer 7.1, what's new in LiveCycle Forms 7.1, including performance enhancements, API enhancements and new rendering types, as well as an introduction to LiveCycle Print 7.1. This is also a chance to ask questions directly to product managers, and get their input into the products. They are also extremely interested in hearing from you regarding development with LiveCycle. The Breeze session can be accessed online. The session will be recorded and we'll put it up on the LiveCycle Developer Center for all to see. See you May 3rd!

April 10, 2006

Like Java? Like Adobe? Work for us!

The Developer Relations team here at Adobe is looking to hire a Java evangelist. You can check out the complete job description at our jobs website, but here's the initial text: "The Developer Relations Team has an immediate opening for a highly qualified individual with software development, architecture and software marketing experience to take on the role of technical evangelist, focusing on the Java development community. The successful candidate will play a critical role not only in shaping and evangelizing Adobe technology to the Java and enterprise development community, but also in ultimately driving the adoption of Adobe technologies in that community. The successful candidate will take a leadership role in designing and delivering high impact, high quality presentations covering a variety of Java-centric topics. A solid understanding of Java, JavaScript, J2EE, Windows, AIX, Linux, and other programming languages and platforms is required, as well as knowledge of Adobe products, including Adobe LiveCycle, Flash, Flex and ColdFusion."

Sound interesting? Apply online using the link on the job description page.

March 31, 2006

Want to know more about LiveCycle? Mark your calendar for May 3rd

Three LiveCycle Product Managers and myself are planning to do an online Breeze presentation showing three pieces of LiveCycle 7.1: Adobe LiveCycle Designer, Adobe LiveCycle Forms and Adobe LiveCycle Print, a new product to the LiveCycle family. The online Breeze presentation is scheduled for 3 hours, starting at 12:00 Noon ET, on May 3rd. If you develop software with LiveCycle, or are interested in learning more about the products, this is a great chance to meet the team. The Breeze presentation will be available online here, and will be recorded so you can view it later at your leisure. We are planning to spend 1/2 hour on each product, discussing what each does and what the changes are for LiveCycle 7.1, and then spend 1/2 hour answering any questions from visitors.

If you have other LiveCycle products that you're interested in, please let me know. I am also hoping to post a few introductions to LiveCycle Designer. I finished up my first one today, and am working with the web team to post it online.

Forms Fixed Now

I believe that we've fixed the problem that we had for some LiveCycle Forums now, so you should be able to post your questions there again. Sorry about that. BTW: We do have Adobe LiveCycle engineers in those forums, answering your questions, so if you've got questions, we've got people ready to answer them.

Some LiveCycle Forums Are Broken

I appear to have broken some of the LiveCycle forums at http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?14@428.hsL0g1cSfwg.56@.3bbeda8d. Some forums allow posting new topics, but most do not. I'm working on getting this fixed today, sorry for the problems. Thanks to those of you who have notified me via postings in those forums or emails directly. Hopefully I'll have this solved sometime today. The forums do not appear to be respecting the permissions that are in them.

March 29, 2006

LiveCycle Designer Plugins Now Free

If you develop software with Adobe LiveCycle, you'll be interested to know that the LiveCycle Designer Plugins for Eclipse and Rational are now available for free. Yes, free, as in beer. Previously they were closed to members of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program. If you read this blog regularly, you'll know that Ensemble made their Designer plugin for Visual Studio .NET available for free a few weeks ago. We committed to making our plugins available for free, its just taken this long to get the website up to date (they're super busy with redesigning the website for the next major version). If you're looking to get started with LiveCycle, the AEDP is still the best way to get started. You get unlimited support by email as well as access to individual developer licenses of LiveCycle software. The cost is $1495 per year per developer.

March 20, 2006

Adobe LiveCycle Forums

I'm working on fixing up the LiveCycle Forums at http://www.adobeforums.com... We've now got a container that shows you all the LiveCycle forums, which really helps see what forums are available. I still think that we've got too many forums, and need your help.

Here's what I think we should have: 1 forum for general LiveCycle questions. Under that, one forum for each of the following products: LiveCycle Designer, LiveCycle Forms, LiveCycle Reader Extensions and LiveCycle Workflow. The other products would be handled in the overall LIveCycle forums, until they got to a number of posts per day and it became unmanageable.

What do you think of this? Something that needs to be done, or am I just looking for trouble in reorganizing the forums at this point?

March 17, 2006

Are you a student looking for a co-op position?

Are you a university student looking for a co-op job for the summer? Have you got great experience with Java, Flash and / or server technologies. If so, then Adobe Developer Relations is looking to hire you. Check out this job description, and then send your resume in. Feel free to post a comment to this blog if you send your resume in. I'll get your email from there, and then I'll be on the lookout for you.

Hey, is that an engineer in the Adobe forum?

If you've been following the Adobe forums lately, you've probably noticed something new... Namely more posts, a faster response, and higher quality answers. If you're wondering why, then the answer lies in the fact that Adobe LiveCycle engineers are now monitoring the forums on a regular basis, and contributing posts to them. You'll find most of them in forums such as Adobe LiveCycle Designer, Adobe LiveCycle Form Manager, Adobe LiveCycle Workflow, Adobe LiveCycle Workflow Designer. If you've got questions about LiveCycle, AdobeForums.com and start posting your questions. You should notice a quick response to your questions, which will help you develop better software with LiveCycle.

March 07, 2006

Ensemble's Designer Plugin for Visual Studio .NET Now Free

If you're working in a .NET environment and building applicaitons using Adobe LiveCycle, then today is your lucky day. Go out and buy a lottery ticket*. Seriously. And don't worry about the time off, because you'll save that time in development now that Ensemble Systems has made their .NET plugin for LiveCycle Designer available for free. No more switching between Designer and Visual Studio. One application can now be used to develop the forms and the services around your forms.

If you're just getting started with LiveCycle, you'd probably want to check out Ensemble's samples page as well, where they show you how to store comments to PDF documents using web services, as well as a .NET sample DVD store.

Finally, if you're developing LiveCycle solutions using J2EE and you haven't checked out Ensemble's Glider product, then you should. From their page, "With Glider you can now code, compile and debug J2EE applications like a regular Java program. This means that you can incrementally edit, build and test your enterprise applications, in a matter of seconds." No more deploying to an app server, reloading and waiting. Its a pretty amazing product, and a huge time saver for Java developers.

* Playing the lottery is a game of random chance. Getting Ensemble's plugin will not increase your chances of winning, but it will cut down the time for software development.

March 01, 2006

Combining Adobe LiveCycle and Adobe ColdFusion

Yesterday we posted an interview with Allen Levine, to the LiveCycle Developer Center. In it, we talk to Allen about his work on integrating Adobe LiveCycle software with Adobe ColdFusion. There's also some sample files available that show how to call Adobe LiveCycle using ColdFusion components.

If you're unfamiliar with LiveCycle, then a Breeze presentation that I gave a few weeks ago may be of interest to you. You can get started with LiveCycle by joining the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program, at a cost of $1495 per year. Membership in that program includes 1 year of unlimited email support for developers, as well as access to the LiveCycle software.

February 27, 2006

Improving performance in Adobe LiveCycle

Last week Hong Qiu pushed our new LiveCycle Performance Center live. This page will be our main page for performance related information with LiveCycle. I urge you to check it out, bookmark it and check it if you're concerned or interested in LiveCycle software. BTW: A good way to keep up to date with new content is to subscribe to our monthly enterprise developer newsletter (at least until we get RSS feeds on our developer centers).

February 24, 2006

Heading to New York in 2 Weeks

I'm heading to New York for the AJAX seminar in two weeks... If you're in New York and working on LiveCycle or Flex solutions, I'd love to meet you on Tuesday morning (14th of March). Leave a comment in the blog and I'll email you back.

February 22, 2006

Want to get started with LiveCycle? Try the toolbox

Yesterday we release the Adobe LiveCycle Toolbox which is a "self-contained development environment for prototyping, developing, and testing Adobe LiveCycle applications." What this toolbox does is provide developers with a single download that provides a Windows / JBoss / MySQL environment of LIveCycle software, including Forms, Form Manager, Reader Extensions and Workflow. It also contains samples that help you get started for common LiveCycle tasks, like prepopulating a PDF form, processing the data etc...

We've recently started a survey for members of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program, and one consistent piece of feedback was that it would be nice to have one install that contained the most popular applications from LiveCycle. We're happy to announce today that we've got something that fulfills that request.

Please note that you do need to be a member of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program to access this download.

February 16, 2006

Adding a border to Designer fields

Jesse Warden posted a blog entry yesterday saying how LiveCycle forms would be much better if we had some sort of Flash content in the PDFs. One example that he gave was "tabbing that actually visually shows you where you are"... Here's a small samplethat shows a form highlighting fields as a user enters into them, and then reverting back to the original color as they exit the field.

Now, in making this sample, I came across a small problem. In Designer, you can't use fieldName.borderColor if the borderColor hasn't been set already. So, first you need to set the border color for each field (in the Border pallette), and *then* you can manipulate the border using JavaScript. If the border is not set in the Border pallette, you can't set the border attributes via JavaScript. I hope this helps you out, and also shows the ease of which the form designer can create better looking forms.

February 14, 2006

A whole page of samples for LiveCycle Designer

Yesterday we posted an entire page of samples for LiveCycle Designer. The page currently includes 20 samples, dealing with topics such as "Getting and setting form field values", "Changing the appearance and behavior of an object at runtime", "Working with data sources and schemas", "Form layout techniques", and "Working with digital signatures".

Maybe the best part about the page is the one sentence at the top: Send us a sample to have it posted here. If you're building form based applications using LiveCycle software and want to put your code up on the web for others to use, send us an email and we'll work with you to get it up on that page (or other pages for software other than Designer).

If you have questions about the samples, please post them in the LiveCycle Designer forum.

February 01, 2006

Want an intro to LiveCycle? Live in the Bay Area?

If you want an introduction to LiveCycle and the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program and live in the Bay Area, I'll be doing a presentation on LiveCycle to the Bay Area Application Developers Macromedia User Group next Wednesday night, February 8th, at 6:30 PM.

From their site:
When: February 8, 2006 at 6:30:00 PM
Where: Learn IT! (250 Montgomery Street in the San Francisco Financial District) - 15th Floor
Cost: $7.00 if registered in advance (see above); $10.00 at the door.
What: The use of forms, whether paper or electronic, to capture, validate, convey, and record data is essential to the successful operations of most enterprises. Adobe LiveCycle is a set of document services that greatly increase the efficiency with which electronic forms are processed. Mike Potter of Adobe Developer Relations will provide an overview of LiveCycle and demonstrate designing a form in LiveCycle Designer (a free download is available), pre-populating that form and extracting the information using LiveCycle Forms, enabling other functionality in Adobe Reader with LiveCycle Reader Extensions, securing the document with LiveCycle Policy Server and LiveCycle Document Security, and finally, building a workflow and putting the pieces together with Adobe LiveCycle Workflow. Mike also will discuss the features and benefits of the Enterprise Developer Program and will tell you how you can join.

If there are other topics related to LiveCycle that you'd like me to cover, please let me know and I'll try to squeeze them into the agenda.

January 31, 2006

Getting Started with LiveCycle Designer

The third and final article (ZIP file with sampe files here) in the series "Getting Started with LiveCycle Designer" is now online at the (slightly) revamped Adobe LiveCycle Designer Developer Center. The first and second articles in the series are also available, in .zip format.

Its worthwhile to note that the (slightly) revamped Adobe LiveCycle Designer Developer Center has a look that more closely resembles the Macromedia developer centers. (This is also the first article for Adobe LiveCycle developers that appears on Macromedia's developer homepage. Hooray for integration!). This is in line with what we want to achieve with the other LiveCycle developer centers. Posting photos of the authors and providing bio information helps to build the community around LiveCycle. (BTW, if you want to be featured and write content for us, we'd love to feature you and / or your company... Contact me by email to get started.) Combine that with blogging, an increased presence in our online forums, and a monthly enterprise developer newsletter that keeps everyone up to date on what we're doing with Adobe enterprise software and the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program, and you've got the start of a compelling online community dedicated to helping developers build awesome software with Adobe products.

If you haven't checked out Adobe LiveCycle Designer, then Paul's three articles will definitely help you get up and running quickly. When you're ready to move on past Designer, the Enterprise Developer Program is here to provide you with software (1 year individual developer licenses) and support (1 year of email based developer support) to make sure you get up and running quickly.

January 13, 2006

Ideas for presentations / instructions?

I would like to start hosting "Mike's Mondays" (using Adobe Breeze) to help developers with some of our products. The first one I'd like to start with is LiveCycle Designer. What types of instructional material would you like to see with LiveCycle Designer? Give me your ideas, and then I'll setup a Breeze meeting / instructional hour to help you solve your problems with LC Designer.

Comparing form fields in Acrobat, Designer and Flash

Carl Young, who puts together a great PDF conference, has posted a great tutorial showing the difference in form fields in Acrobat, LiveCycle Designer and Flash. Carl also has a list of tips for Acrobat 7 and LiveCycle Designer 7, including a great tutorial on how to connect to a webservice using LiveCycle Designer. I am working on posting a similar tutorial on how to build a simple Amazon store search inside a PDF document.

September 01, 2005

Plug Designer into your favourite IDE

A very useful download was posted to the LiveCycle Developer Center the other day that I thought I should highlight. If you're doing LiveCycle development, specifically with LiveCycle Designer, you'll be happy to know that we've created 3 plug-ins for popular IDEs that will help you get your job done quicker.

The first plugin is for Rational Application Developer. It has been tested against RAD 6.0.0 and also works for RSA 6.0.0, and RWD 6.0.0.

The second plugin is for Eclipse. The plugin should work for version 3.0 and 3.1 of Eclipse.

And finally, the good people over at Ensemble Systems have created a LiveCycle Designer plugin for Visual Studio .NET.

The first two are available free of charge, the last one you'll need to buy from Ensemble, though they do have a free 30 day trial avialable. [Updated: With the launch of the developer program, we've now made these plugins available to members of the Enterprise Developer Program only.]

So, no matter which of those three IDEs you're using, you won't have to switch from Designer and back again. We'll do our best to continue to help build useful tools like this for enterprise developers.

Here are the links for downloading:

1. You can get the .zip files for the Eclipse and Rational plugin from the LiveCycle Designer Developer Center.

2. Visual Studio .NET Plugin (must buy from Ensemble)

I'm watching comments here, so post back if you have any problems with any of the plugins.

August 29, 2005

Beta test the next generation of Distiller / Elements Server

Adobe Distiller Server and Adobe Elements Server are being replaced by a new product called LiveCycle PDF Generator. The beta program for that product is now accepting applicants. If you want to test out the next generation PDF conversion product from Adobe, you can join in on the beta program. You'll be among the first to check out our next gen server side PDF generation product, and we'll use your feedback to help improve the product and documentation. Before applying, I'll warn you that you should know something about application servers, since you may be required to install or maintain one in order to run LiveCycle PDF Generator.

August 18, 2005

LiveCycle Designer Trial Updated To Version 7

We updated the trial version of LiveCycle Designer today to version 7, from version 6. There are now 3 ways to try Designer:

1. Online, without having to download anything, at http://adobe.demoservers.com You can also try Acrobat Pro on that machine. You login to the server, and can use the product(s) for 3 hours at a time, allowing anyone to try it out without having to download anything.

2. Standalone download at http://www.adobe.com/products/server/adobedesigner/tryreg.html This is what we updated to version 7, so if you've recently tried to download it an got version 6, uninstall that and get the most recent version.

3. Bundled with the Acrobat Pro 7 trial at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/tryout.html

August 16, 2005

LiveCycle Designer Hosted Trial

One of the areas that I think I can really help out with my blog is to highlight the new items on our LiveCycle developer centers, which is the main focus of my job right now. I'll try and post content updates that we have, so there's an easy place for developers to find new information on the site (we don't have new! sprinkled throughout the site).

To that extent, the first thing that I'd like to point out is the hosted trial for LiveCycle Designer and Acrobat 7. They are hosted by a company called Surgient, and allow you to play around with Designer or Acrobat, without having to download or install anything. Its great for people who can't modify their systems (eg. government employees, developers etc...) but still want to see what the product(s) can do.