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Adobe this week announced the arrival of LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, a new class of what is called "customer engagement" applications. The goal of this application suite is to connect people inside and outside organizations to the internal information and processes they need.

Here's the nitty gritty: An integrated J2EE server solution, LiveCycle ES uses core Adobe PDF and Flash technologies to translate numerous sources of original content (paper, audio, video, text, xml, etc.) into PDFs which can then be delivered via multiple channels (web, e-mail, existing applications, etc.). It serves as a document capture, e-forms, online application, process management, and digital document management solution rolled into one.

What are the key benefits of using LiveCycle? I liken it to having paper based internal processes come to life on the web. Take the best of the paper world and make it electronic in a way that is familiar to users and compliant with legal and regulatory mandates.

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Its document capture capability is the basis for leveraging existing systems and content (paper and electronic) and creating a digital document which can then be managed through a process workflow. For many LiveCycle customers, requirements demand that digital documents be secure, auditable, valid, authenticated, and digitally signed. LiveCycle addresses all these needs by providing solutions (through its individual components) that assure compliance with regulatory, legal, and privacy mandates.

According to Brian Wick, product marketing manager at Adobe, what sets LiveCycle apart is the breadth of services and ease of development and deployment. With a single architecture and a wide selection of services to invoke, it boasts the widest integration of services than its closest competitors Microsoft and IBM.

With more than 99 percent of all desktops using the free Adobe Reader and Flash plug-in, extending the LiveCycle functionality beyond the firewall is simplified. This extensibility drives home the key theme and message of the product, which is customer engagement: engaging users especially outside the firewall and ensuring they don't abandon the process, pick up the phone, or go away to a competitor.

Industries that can benefit most from this technology include government, life sciences, manufacturing, and financial. The reason is that all these industries have a high degree of external customer (suppliers, vendors, etc.) interaction coupled with stringent regulatory, legal, and privacy requirements. Since they are traditionally heavy on the paper-based document requirements, they are ripe for the integration and document capture capabilities LiveCycle offers. This suite offers the rich combination of rigor and structure required for compliance with the dynamic capability to display flash animations to ease end-user training and online help. A variety of demos and case studies are available online here.

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