Adobe's New App Development Tools Suited to Broker Workstations
Adobe has been working with a large financial firm to develop a broker workstation based on Adobe's LiveCycle Enterprise Suite software, the second version of which is being released today.
This product has come a long way since the last time we looked at it, which was two years ago for a story on digital rights management (the software can be used to set and preserve permissions on documents -- who may see them, who may edit, print and so forth). The software now encompasses Air, Flex and electronic forms technologies and can be used to build interactive, browser-based applications that can be applied toward building broker workstations or customer acquisition, retention and reporting applications. Used for a financial advisor workstation, the software could be used to schedule a customer meeting via email, automatically updating the FA's calendar and generating a client report with upsell suggestions.
Adobe is offering a hosted version of the development tools so that developers can work on Adobe's equipment. It also offers production instances of the applications they generate hosted over Amazon's cloud.
For enterprise developers, LiveCycle ES2 integrates with the Flash Platform and PDF technologies. New Adobe application modeling technology brings higher productivity to Adobe Flex and LiveCycle developers and allows them to more efficiently write applications by reducing the amount of code and simplifying data and service integration, according to Adobe. A new LiveCycle ES2 plug-in for Adobe Flash Builder 4 beta lets developers more seamlessly embed LiveCycle ES2 technologies into any Flex-based application. Furthermore, the new Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service (formerly Adobe Flash Collaboration Service), a hosted service, lets developers do their work on Adobe equipment.
The new Adobe LiveCycle Mosaic ES2 is a composite framework for assembling applications. Developers can extend existing enterprise applications by exposing their business logic and user interfaces into application "tiles." Tiles are context-aware, user interface application components that can be assembled to create unified views that best suit the user's work habits and specific needs. Users can switch between multiple tasks without losing work in progress, and can save workspaces to return to later, preserving data context on the server via an Adobe Air desktop application.
Adobe is also announcing the ability for enterprise customers to deploy LiveCycle ES2 as fully managed production instances in the cloud, with 24x7 monitoring and support from Adobe, including product upgrades. LiveCycle ES2 preconfigured instances will be hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud computing environment.
Adobe LiveCycle ES2 is expected to become available before the end of 2009. The Adobe LiveCycle ES2 cloud deployment option is expected to become available in early 2010.
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