Dr Flex & Dr LiveCycle

Look at these videos that demonstrate how you can use LiveCycle ES to build a process and an AIR application to publish tweets to a corporate Twitter account where you have control on what’s published or not. Part 1 focuses on building the client with Flash Builder 4 with the LC Service Discovery plugin. In part 2 you will see how to archive all tweets in a PDF/A format within LiveCycle Content Services.

Part1: http://www.vimeo.com/8886180

Part2: http://www.vimeo.com/8886413

If you have installed and deployed Adobe LiveCycle Content Services ES for Document Management and/or Archiving purposes you have already seen the out-of-the-box features that are included in the product. Now, if you have written your own extensions and want to package these, the easiest way to do this is by creating a so called AMP file. This is a format that can be imported in another instance of Adobe LiveCycle Content Services ES.

Now without going into details on how to create these AMP files, you should know that there are also AMP files available in the community that you might want to evaluate. If you have installed the full LiveCycle ES Suite you will also get, as part of the SDK, a couple of sample packages such as records management, blog integration (including WordPress), and others.

Now the documentation is not very clear on how to deploy the included samples (or other available AMP files) to your deployed Content Services application. Below you will find a couple of steps on how to import AMP files.

1. Locate the C:\Adobe\LiveCycle8.2\LiveCycle_ES_SDK\misc directory

2. In there you will find a couple of AMP files and a utility called Module Management Tool. (adobe-contentservices-mmt.jar)

3. Locate the C:\Adobe\LiveCycle8.2\jboss\server\all\deploy\adobe-contentservices.ear

4. Retrieve the contentservices.war file from the ear file above

5. Open a command line tool and goto the directory C:\Adobe\LiveCycle8.2\LiveCycle_ES_SDK\misc

6. Run: java -jar adobe-contentservices-mmt.jar install yourfilename.amp contentservices.war (Before doing this is is recommended to make a backup of the ear file!)

7. After this, copy back the contentservices.war file into the adobe-contentservices.ear file and copy it back to the LiveCycle ES Deployment directory (C:\Adobe\LiveCycle8.2\jboss\server\all\deploy)

7a. To validate wether the AMP is included in the war file, you can run the following command for a list of extensions: “java -jar adobe-contentservices-mmt.jar list contentservices.war”

8. Restart your jboss services to be 100% sure that you have the extensions available

If you find any interesting AMP files in the community, please share them with us. Have fun in trying the above.

Disease:

You are implementing a Document Management system or you have just deployed this within your organization. A common challenge is very often to find a balance between a technically clean, flexible, scalable and future-proof solution on one hand, and to get your solution adopted by the end-users on the other.

Unfortunately the term end-users is often interpreted as “the last step in the deployment”, and very often the solution that is deployed is not adopted very well because it is too difficult or not intuitive to use. Have a look at some of the document management systems out there, and ask any “end-user” if they like the interface that is offered from that product!

Often the business where most “end-users” work, pay for these projects, and therefore should expect a solution that fits within their way of working, their processes and their knowledge-level. So why offer an interface that offers over 100 document management features where the user only wants to store a document in the archive. Result is most likely that the things they really need are hidden somewhere, and require extensive training. For a casual contributor (the 80/20 rule applies here as well…. most people in an organization only every now and then interact with the Document Management System) it is too much to do a 1 or 2 day training on how to use an application, especially when he/she needs to do this over and over again.

Prescription:

I guess the point above is clear, and there should be more focus on creating engaging experiences as well for business users that use Document Management in their daily activities. You will find a lot of examples on how web 2.0 changes everything that you see on the web. Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are more and more common for many websites. A more recent development is that RIA’s can also be deployed on your desktop for instance by using Adobe AIR.

So what does deploying a RIA web application to your desktop mean? Think about using standard web technology such as HTML, AJAX and Flash for building desktop applications that support business users in their activities. Think about intuitive, easy-to-use, and graphically oriented applications that everybody enjoys to work with. Now this can be the front-end for your Document Management System!

Adobe offers a Document Management System via LiveCycle Content Services ES. Yes, it has all the features you need…. and more. It offers a web interface, integration with MS-Office and many other ways to interact with the system as a business user. I will not go into te details for each way of interacting with the system. However, there is one specific area that I would like to highlight here.

In the development community out there you will find many interesting applications that can be used as a front-end for Content Services. There is 2 I would like to highlight in this post.

Firstly there is an initiative called Opsoro. These guys are developing an AIR application that can be used on top of LiveCycle Content Services. The application is build using AJAX techniques, and resides right on a local computer’s desktop. No bookmarks, no limitations of a web-browser… very simple and easy. Here is a screenshot on how this looks:

It has some interesting features such as live-search, preview, etcetera. Below a screenshot on how the preview is displayed.

According to the website of Opsoro there are other things planned to utilize the features that are offered by Adobe AIR even more, such as offline usage, drag&drop interaction with the desktop. Check out the roadmap and other things their website.

Now Opsoro is not the only initiative out there that focuses on the usability of a Document Management System by offering a RIA on the desktop. Another initiative is FlexSpaces by Integrated Semantics. Their AIR client is based on Adobe Flex and offers some very handy features for searching using Tag Clouds, category search, tasks, launching processes, offline usage, drag&drop, and many others. Check out the complete list and their screencams.

You will notice that the applications above are related to Alfresco, an open source ECM solution. Adobe LiveCycle Content Services ES is based on Alfresco, and includes integration with other enterprise features/functions of LiveCycle ES. A good post about this can be found here.

The screenshots above are real screenshots running on my local LiveCycle Content Services demo machine. If you would like to know more, please get in touch.

Tips to stay healthy:

If you are considering an implemenation of a Document Management System, do think about the success factors of that implementation. One can have the most optimal technical solution in place, but if it is hard to embed in the business processes of business users, the system will never bring the desired results. Key here is that the system is easy to use, intuitive, requires little or no training, etcetera. This is what Rich Internet Applications are about. Now it’s time to RIAlise Document Management!

Disease:

You are an Acrobat user creating documents, brochures, leaflets and other information that you want to share with other collegues or people outside your organization for approval, comment, changes, etcetera. Within Acrobat there is a feature called “Send for shared review” that enables you to do this. But what if you don’t have a central server to store it on so other people can access it?

Prescription:

One of the new features within LiveCycle ES update 1 is Content Services. This essentially offers you Enterprise Content Management features that you can include in your business processes. These business processes can be fully controlled processes that are setup within LiveCycle using Process Management. But these features are also available for more ad-hoc type of business processes where Adobe Acrobat is used.

After you have created a PDF file and want to send it to some people for review, you can use the send for shared review feature. Here is a screenshot of this option.

Now, the next step is an important step where you can point to a central location where people can find the file for reviewing. This is where you can connect Acrobat to LiveCycle ES Content Services. Content Services exposes itself in many different ways; via a browser, via MS-Office, via CIFS, FTP and also via WebDav. WebDav is the way to connect the Acrobat business process (shared review) to an Enterprise Repository.

After you have selected the option above, you will see a dialogue.

Select the internal server option, and click next to find the following screen.

Here you have 3 options to choose. To connect to Adobe LiveCycle Content Services ES choose the 3rd option, a Web Server folder. As the URL you should enter http://yourserver:port/contentspace/webdav (If you don’t have a server available, and would like to try, let me know) I configured this using my server, and see the following screen after this.

After this you will be asked for your credentials and you will see a couple of screens to ask you to send a link to the document, and also to indicate the persons that are part of this review. End result is that the document now resides in the LiveCycle Content Services repository. See the screenshot of the Web Interface of Content Services.

I will not go into the possibilities that you then have from there, but just remember that there is a full range of

Tips to stay healthy:

Just make sure that the people that are participating in the review have an account within LiveCycle ES (Typically this is done by synchronizing a corporate LDAP tree), and you should be fine.