Adobe LiveCycle gives business apps a shot in the arm

Enterprise Suite 2 gives developers an alternative to Windows-only tools for creating automated workflows and improving user productivity

Adobe doesn't make enterprise business applications; but it does make those mission critical apps easier to use, accessible from mobile devices and quicker to build through its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite.

Watch a slideshow of Adobe's LiveCycle

Business applications such as SAP human resources, Siebel CRM, Oracle financials, or home-grown solutions are the lifeblood of most companies. They keep the organization humming and provide accurate data to executives, but these benefits can come at the expense of user friendliness. It can require months of training to perform even simple tasks with these monolithic back-end systems.

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Adobe doesn't make enterprise business applications; but it does make those mission critical apps easier to use, accessible from mobile devices and quicker to build through its LiveCycle Enterprise Suite.

Watch a slideshow of Adobe's LiveCycle

Business applications such as SAP human resources, Siebel CRM, Oracle financials, or home-grown solutions are the lifeblood of most companies. They keep the organization humming and provide accurate data to executives, but these benefits can come at the expense of user friendliness. It can require months of training to perform even simple tasks with these monolithic back-end systems.

Yet today's employees expect their at-work apps to have the look and simplicity of their at-home apps, like iTunes or Facebook.

In 2004, Adobe introduced LiveCycle – a product suite that enables developers to build visual interfaces to complex applications and to automate business processes, while maintaining the integrity of enterprise data.

LiveCycle Enterprise Suite just received a major update to Version 2 (ES2). Improvements include the ability to design even better interfaces using rich Internet application (RIA) and Web 2.0 technologies, presenting users with more relevant data through task-specific dashboards, automated tools for developers and cloud development options.

Click to see: Net results

LiveCycle ES2 is a Java 2 Enterprise Edition-compatible product running on industry-standard operating systems and Java application servers. ES2 includes numerous modules that range from connectors to enterprise content management systems and data services to PDF generation and rights management. Developers and business analysts build finished applications by combining these services.

For end users, applications usually appear in a personalized workspace that's accessed from a browser. For more flexibility, the new LiveCycle Workspace ES2 Mobile (available for the iPhone and Windows Mobile or BlackBerry devices) let users participate in business processes while away from their main computer.

Developers can build and test applications on enterprise servers or in the cloud using pre-configured LiveCycle ES2 instances on Amazon EC2. For this test, we took the cloud approach. Solutions are then deployed on your internal servers (a cloud production option should be available in 2010).

A fully equipped workshop

The key to the whole development process is LiveCycle Workbench ES2. It's a visual integrated development environment (IDE) with two main views, Process Design and Forms Design. The concepts haven't changed in this version, but usability is improved and authoring requires fewer steps.

You start by importing assets, such as images and interactive elements produced elsewhere, perhaps a Flash movie. In my test, I had no trouble importing assets or switching to the Forms view and dragging components onto a canvas to create a PDF form. I immediately noticed the new Action Builder because it reduces the number of clicks required to design interactive forms. For instance, you get choices for hiding and showing fields, so now there's no need to write any JavaScript.