Adobe LeanPrint is here!

March 6th, 2012 Posted in Announcements, General
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Adobe has just released LeanPrint, an enterprise-class, software-only printing solution that dramatically reduces printing costs by using an innovative method to redo the layout of documents while printing from popular applications and browsers.

Adobe LeanPrint also lets you track print jobs and costs, and analyze paper and toner savings arising from LeanPrint usage at the document, user, and organization levels.

Here’s an excerpt from an Adobe blog post:

Adobe LeanPrint is printing software that reduces costs by implementing patent-pending technologies from Adobe that automatically fine-tune formatting, colors and layout regardless of the printing device — inkjet or laser, personal or networked printer. LeanPrint provides plug-ins to common desktop applications such as Adobe Acrobat®, Adobe Reader®, Microsoft® Excel®, Microsoft Word and common browsers that typically account for the majority of printing in the enterprise and home. LeanPrint allows final output to be shown before the user sends the document to the printer ensuring visual assurance of a streamlined execution.

While other solutions aim to reduce the environmental impact by setting printing quotas or routing to a specific printer, LeanPrint takes a different approach by using less pages in Super Saver mode and providing a Toner Saver option to create smarter, less toner-heavy prints. With LeanPrint software, customers can easily choose settings to obtain a clear picture of the savings for each print job within the print preview and quantify the amount of paper and toner being used. With My Savings, savings achieved over days, months and years from within LeanPrint can be conveniently monitored and tracked, providing an incentive to save.

Some useful resources

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Toggling between two fields in a dynamic form

March 1st, 2012 Posted in Enterprise solutions, LiveCycle
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The LiveCycle Cookbook, a community resource for developers, has a recent recipe and sample artifact by Arjun V: Toggling between two fields in a dynamic form.

The Cookbook homepage is here: http://cookbooks.adobe.com/livecycle. Check out the available recipes and contribute your own.

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Introducing The LiveCycle Post

January 24th, 2012 Posted in Community Help, General, LiveCycle
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If you’re a LiveCycle user or consultant, you may have found it difficult at times to follow all those great blogs and resources out there in the community. That’s why we’ve brought you The LiveCycle Post, a human-moderated aggregator of the best user-assistance content from the community.

How does it work? Well, it’s simple. We read through a bunch of machine-aggregated blog posts every now and then and moderate the ones that LiveCycle users would find useful. These blog posts are authored by LiveCycle users, Adobe partners, customers, and Adobe employees.

And yes, if you have a LiveCycle resource that you’d want us to track, simply leave its RSS feed URL as a comment to this blog post. All rights for your content remain yours. We’ll also make sure we include your name and a link to your blog in the aggregated posts.

Here’s the link again: http://blogs.adobe.com/livecyclepost/.

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Localizing Images: Cultural Aspects and Visual Metaphors

December 2nd, 2011 Posted in Announcements, Downloads, Events, General, Technical Communication
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In May 2011, I had the opportunity to deliver a session titled Localizing Images: Cultural Aspects and Visual Metaphors at the STC Technical Communication Summit in Sacramento, California. It was a great experience speaking on this topic to a predominantly American audience, since there was cultural exchange happening right from the word Go.

A variation of the session was also accepted on the program for the 2011 STC India Conference. I was looking forward to traveling to Chennai to present the session on December 3. Unfortunately, a middle ear infection played spoilsport and the doctor forbade me from flying for at least a couple of weeks. My colleague, Nandini Gupta, then graciously agreed to present the session on my behalf.

A slide deck for the session is embedded below:

Localizing Images: Cultural Aspects and Visual Metaphors

You can download an audio recording of my session at the STC Summit from this link (~9 MB). The recording should be used in conjunction with the slide deck.
There’s more! The paper (accompanying this session) published in the Proceedings of the conference is embedded below. Happy reading!

Localizing Images: Cultural Aspects and Visual Metaphors

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Project and team hierarchy in ICR

September 30th, 2011 Posted in Enterprise solutions, Everything LiveCycle, LiveCycle
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The campaign is the highest layer in the Integrated Content Review object hierarchy. The project is the second layer in the object hierarchy and the asset is the third layer. In fact, an asset is the basic unit of work — a work item — in the Integrated Content Review workflow.

Multiple levels of project nesting are supported.

Assets are actively managed through review cycles and drive all statuses in the campaign. For example, if an asset is late, the status of the parent campaign automatically becomes red. If all the constituent assets of a campaign are on time or green, the status of the campaign is green. Therefore, the status of a campaign is derived bottom-up instead of top-down.

Team member inheritance

Teams are built in a bottom-up fashion. Team members at any level in the campaign hierarchy include team members from lower levels. In other words, a campaign includes all members of a project. A project, in turn, includes all members of the assets within it.

Additionally, at any level in the campaign, a new member can be added directly to the team list. These new members have no responsibilities towards the campaign, but they receive notifications when statuses change. They also get access to the solution interface so that they can proactively see how the campaign is progressing.

For background information, you can refer to the Integrated Content Review Solution Guide.

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Setting up the ICR development environment

September 22nd, 2011 Posted in Enterprise solutions, Everything LiveCycle
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The Integrated Content Review solution ships with a solution interface and building blocks that you can customize as per your organization’s requirements. Before you set out to customize these components, you must first set up your development environment. Setting up the ICR development environment involves the following broad steps:

    • Set up prerequisites
    • Locate the solution interface and required dependencies
    • Understand available projects
    • Set up available projects in Flash Builder
    • Set up Java projects in Eclipse
    • Build and deploy the solution interface

For detailed information about each of these steps, refer to this PDF document (download).

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Integrated Content Review solution user scenarios

August 17th, 2011 Posted in Enterprise solutions, Everything LiveCycle
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The Integrated Content Review solution enables enterprises to streamline the planning, creation, review, approval, and archiving of assets used in digital marketing campaigns. The solution includes a solution interface and the Adobe Creative Suite Task List Extension for Integrated Content Review.

Using the solution interface, you can manage assets through creation, review, and approval workflows. The Creative Suite Task List extension lets creative professionals submit artifacts for review and receive comments and approval from right within Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop.

The infographic below captures the ICR workflow and user scenarios, together with the roles/personas involved at each step. (Click the image to view it full-size).

For descriptions of ICR roles/personas and user scenarios, see this chapter in the Integrated Content Review 10.0 Solution Guide.

For further information, you can refer to the following resources:

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Getting started with Adobe Customer Experience Solutions

August 15th, 2011 Posted in Enterprise solutions, Everything LiveCycle
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Adobe Customer Experience Solutions help create, manage, and deliver high-impact, personalized interactions that captivate customers and extend brand values across digital channels. Powered by the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP), these solutions include rich enterprise applications and friendly user interfaces.

To understand Adobe’s Customer Experience Management philosophy and roadmap, view this great interview by Ben Watson, Adobe’s principal customer experience strategist.

Ben talks about Customer Experience Solutions as being integral to the manage part of Adobe’s becoming a make, manage, and measure brand.

So ultimately, we are becoming the make, manage and measure brand, as I think about it, in the enterprise. While we are probably still best known for ‘make’, in terms of Photoshop, Illustrator – our design tools – Acrobat for making documents, Flash for making multimedia presentations on the web or for delivering and making applications, and delivering an actual interactive application. I would argue that in the web space we are pretty well known from a measuring perspective as well. The acquisition of Omniture a few years has grown into the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, and we have a strong set of tools there around, not just measurement of web activity, but now measurement of social activity analytics that are relative to the communities you might be forming at an enterprise, or also your work that you do with third party communities, like the major social networks, etc.

Here in the middle are these set of technologies that I am focused on which are ultimately the management. By management I mean web content management, business process management and rolling all of this up under the umbrella of customer experience management.

You can read the transcript of the interview here.

While you’re reading up more and getting started, here are a few other resources you’ll find helpful:

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List of recent LiveCycle Quick Fixes

June 14th, 2011 Posted in LiveCycle, Troubleshooting
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For a list of Quick Fixes available for Adobe LiveCycle ES2, ES2 SP1, ES2 SP2, and ES2.5, refer to this knowledgebase article. The Quick Fix list is categorized by version and LiveCycle components.

Once you’ve identified a Quick Fix that you want to apply, please get in touch with Adobe Enterprise Support for further details.

 

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Captivate Getting Started: Create awesome demo videos in a Flash!

April 12th, 2011 Posted in Adobe Captivate, Announcements, How to, Technical Communication Suite
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If you haven’t already caught the wind, Adobe Captivate Getting Started is a multimedia series of articles, tutorials, and instructional videos that put you on the path to accelerated Cp learning. The series includes:

  • 100 short articles/tutorials that would help you get started with Adobe Captivate features
  • 30+ videos and demonstration that explain the procedures to perform the tasks

Yup, we didn’t mistype those numbers — 100 and 30!

The Getting Started series is workflow-based. You, the user, are guided step-by-step to create and publish projects using Cp. The workflows are categorized as Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced, keeping in mind users at different skill levels.

For example, a Basic user is presented with a simple workflow with four quick steps to create a sample demo. An Advanced user begins a notch higher — learning how to design and set-up a video-publication process, and then creating final, professional-quality video output.

Wondering where to begin? Use the table below to determine your existing expertise level and jump right in.

Task Basic Intermediate Advanced
Design

Create storyboards and standardize the look and feel for your projects using templates. Create standard styles for objects that you use in your projects.
Set up

Set up the content development environment by customizing the workspace. Specify the preferences for your projects, such as the publishing location, reporting options for quiz results, and default recording settings.
Create Learn how to record your actions in an application or a screen area.
 

Learn how to create different types of projects.

Create projects by leveraging the existing content, such as MS PPTs or images, or by creating new content and recording your demonstrations.
Edit and Enhance Learn how to add text captions and adjust the timing of these text captions. 

Learn how to choose the preferences for your projects. Also, how to add more slides and objects, and edit them in your project.

Engage your users with interactive objects and widgets, videos, and narration.
Enrich Learn how to make the objects and slides interesting by adding effects and transitions to them. 

 Make your projects interesting and engaging by adding effects to objects and slides. 
Aggregate Integrate multiple courses into a single course using Aggregator. 
Preview Learn how to preview your project before publishing it. 

 Learn how to preview a project or only the required slides during content development. 

 Know how your project looks when it is played to your users. Preview specific slides to refine and tweak interactivity and branching of slides. 
Share Colloborate with your co-workers and reviewers by sharing your projects. 

 Share your projects with other co-workers and reviewers. 
Publish Learn how to publish your project as a SWF file. 

 Learn how to publish your projects in different formats such as SWF, EXE, APP, and F4V. Also, learn how to host your projects on Adobe Connect Pro or an FTP server. 

 Publish your projects in different formats, such as SWF, EXE, APP, and F4V. Learn how to host your projects on an LMS, Adobe Connect Pro, or FTP servers. 

So, get started right away!

If you know other resources that will help, add the links as comments below.

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