Adobe® LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite 2.5 (ES2.5)

Enterprises face a challenge: to more effectively engage with customers beyond the firewall while making efficient use of back-end resources. IT departments need to make investment choices that allow them to better organize and use distributed capabilities. These capabilities must work in concert with scalable applications that engage customers through the appropriate and targeted use of rich and compelling interfaces.

Effectively reaching and engaging customers against a backdrop of rapidly changing business environments, while reducing development costs and maximizing return on investment, demands a service-oriented approach to application delivery in support of improved customer experiences. This type of delivery allows back-end processes to be exposed as loosely coupled services and easily assembled into targeted solutions. Applications must be presented to customers through intuitive interfaces that increase user satisfaction, improve process utilization and completion rates, and increase transaction size.

LiveCycle ES2.5 exposes software as services and elevates customer experiences to a whole new level leveraging a unified developer experience for creating applications that help organizations quickly assemble more secure, feature-rich solutions that leverage Adobe® Flex and Adobe® PDF technologies to dramatically improve user engagement via the cross-platform Adobe Reader® and Adobe Flash® Player software installed on over 98% of internet-enabled PCs worldwide. Organizations can choose the appropriate combinations of standards-based user interface technologies, including Flex, PDF, XML, HTML, and Ajax, to most effectively engage their users, drive flexibility, and reduce custom implementations and vendor lock-in.

While the request/response communication model is sufficient for website browsing, many applications require optimized high-performance data transfer as well as additional modes of interaction, including publish/subscribe messaging and the ability to push data or alerts from the server to the client. The LiveCycle Data Services ES2 module enables high-volume data exchange, guaranteed delivery and synchronization between AIR, Flex, or Ajax-based application interfaces and back-end systems.

Solution components

LiveCycle ES2.5 application-commissioning tasks related to testing, staging, and deploying to production servers are simplified through the use of LiveCycle Archive (LCA) files that automatically package application-related resources in a single archive for transfer between individuals and systems. Administrators can stage or deploy applications to production servers using LiveCycle administrative tools. Staging and production servers do not require development tools for application deployment and management.

The LiveCycle ES2.5 architecture embraces SOA principles that enhance an organization's ability to organize and use distributed capabilities. As described in this paper, LiveCycle ES2.5 provides a framework in which enterprise architects, business analysts, application architects, form designers and developers can match business needs with capabilities by exposing back-end processes as services that are readily assembled into targeted solutions, greatly improving an organization's agility to meet changing business needs.

LiveCycle ES2.5 exposes business functionality as discrete services with clearly defined interfaces that allow them to be repurposed and used as required by other applications. For example, LiveCycle Rights Management ES2 provides the same robust, document-level access control to all applications requiring this functionality. Since exposed services often operate across domains of ownership, organizations must be able to declare policies that describe a service in technical and business terms, encompassing security, governance, and related functions. LiveCycle ES2.5 services are deployed with XML descriptions that qualify their use.

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