Is there a different tool (besides LiveCycle) that we can use to do this? Or if LiveCycle is the only one, which components would we need? I got lost in all of the “buzzwords” on the Adobe website, so I’m unclear on what they all do. (I have a call in to an Adobe specialist, but it will be another 3-5 days before I hear back from someone). Any insight would be great. Thanks!

We spent quite a bit of time creating our own “plumbing” to gather data from databases and then call the LiveCycle Forms ES web service to render a Form Guide / PDF. We did this because we thought this process / web service creation was only available to customers who bought the “Process Management” component of the suite. This confusion wasn’t helped by the fact that in the current version the end point management, etc in AdminUI is actually called “Process Management ES” – I note that in LiveCycle 8.2 this has been renamed (very good idea). I only realised that we could create processes when we bought the Forms ES licenses and “Process Management ES” appeared in the Services tab in AdminUI – I even rang the reseller to check if a mistake had been made.

Had we known this was available, we could have created a web service in Workbench (noname note: don’t confuse Workbench with Workspace – Workbench is the tool used to create processes that you expose as web services, etc. Workspace is the tool used by end users to consume these web services and be part of the processes), say, “RenderApplicationForm” which then gathered data from our databases based on certain rules, transformed this into XML, then rendered a pre-populated Form Guide with this data. Our web site application would then only ever need to call “RenderApplicationForm” and pass in the required values – if any business rules changed or new data needed to be sourced from another table, the front end application wouldn’t need to change at all, we would just need to edit the process in LiveCycle and the new data / rule would be implemented.

Unfortunately it is too late to turn back now and use LiveCycle processes but I cringe everytime we have to add another rule or gather more data because it means a re-compile and re-deploy of the web site application.

Thanks for the video Greg – it was exactly would we be needed by developers to understand the power of LiveCycle (unfortunately it came a year to late for us!).

Thanks again,
John.

There are many options for external applications, including web services, Java APIs, Flash remoting, etc.

Thanks!

Greg

You can also find more information about LiveCycle Workspace ES at http://www.adobe.com/go/learn_lc_euWorkspace

Best practices guide for Workspace – http://help.adobe.com/en_US/livecycle/es/optimize_workspace.pdf

More coming soon…

Thanks!

Greg

However – I didn’t see a part in the demo that showed where a client or employee or an end user initiates the whole process. A demo on a company’s external website or their intranet of the mortgage process.

Maybe there’s a place you can direct me to see the end product created by LiveCycle. For example an IT HelpDesk!

Thanks!