Adobe is hosting a full day of briefings for our customers and partners in Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong & Singapore to introduce the Adobe Customer Experience Management Solutions and new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform.

The morning session is open to all Adobe customers, prospective customers and partners and will focus on best practices and case studies from Adobe Solution Partners in customer experience, digital campaign and content management.

The afternoon session is exclusively for current and prospective Adobe Partners. We will discuss the new opportunities for partnering with Adobe in Web Experience, Customer Experience and the Digital Enterprise Platform.

Dates are as follows;

Melbourne – Tuesday 9th August

Sydney- Thursday 11th August

Singapore – Tuesday August 16th

Hong Kong – Thursday August 18th

There is a great line up of international Adobe speakers and local Adobe Partners attending and I know the content is fantastic.

I’ll also be attending both the Sydney & Melbourne event so drop by and say hello!

Research group Forrester released their latest assessment on the Web Content Management market on July 13th and have put Adobe in the Leader category far ahead of many other players in the market.

The report states that Adobe leads due to their rich functionality, strategy, and enterprise track record.

You can download a free copy of the full Forrester report via Adobe.com

New Solutions Empower Marketing and IT to Transform Multi-Channel Customer Experiences

SAN JOSE, Calif.–(EON: Enhanced Online News)–Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced its new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management (CEM). The platform enables enterprises to build immersive, multi-channel digital interactions for today’s social and mobile customers. A significant milestone in the delivery of its CEM vision, the new offering by Adobe gives enterprises the ability to bring together marketing and IT to deliver engaging, authentic solutions that increase brand loyalty and bolster competitive differentiation.

Additionally, Adobe is delivering a new set of Customer Experience Solutions, built on the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, to help marketers and line of business executives drive personalized, targeted connections and campaigns both online and offline. For IT organizations, the platform helps to optimize customer interactions across all lines of business. With this comprehensive offering for both marketing and IT, enterprises can now drive transformation of customer experiences for acquisition, retention, and brand advocacy.

Powering Customer Experiences with a Unified Platform

Adobe’s new offering is a modular, open, standards-based platform for delivering engaging digital solutions across social, Web, mobile, and print channels. It provides enterprises a unified foundation to make, manage and deliver multi-channel digital experiences leveraging HTML5, Adobe® AIR®, Flash® Player, and Adobe Reader®. Additionally, it includes integration with the Adobe Online Marketing Suite to optimize digital marketing campaigns and personalized digital experiences across all marketing, sales and service delivery channels.

Also released today, mobile application development gets a boost through integration with Adobe Flash Builder® and Flex. Integrated with the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 now include new support for building mobile applications forAndroid devices, BlackBerry PlayBook, iPhone and iPad (see separate press release). With smartphones and tablets proliferating in the enterprise, IT organizations are looking for a way to more efficiently build, deliver and support applications across a broad range of devices and platforms. Using Flash Builder and Flex, enterprises can now use one tool, one framework and one codebase to create high-performance applications that run on the Web, desktops and top mobile platforms.

Driving Customer Engagement Throughout the Customer Lifecycle

Built on the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, Adobe’s new Customer Experience Solutions power new customer-centric experiences out-of-the-box:

• Integrated Content Review – Speeds time-to-market for new marketing campaigns and customer experiences. Improves workflow and processes required to create, review, store and rapidly adapt digital content through different target segments across the entire customer journey.
• Web Experience Management – Attracts new customers by providing business and marketing professionals with a solution for creating, managing and publishing rich content across Web, social, mobile and email.
• Customer Communications – Improves customer loyalty by centralizing and managing the creation, assembly and multi-channel delivery of secure, personalized, interactive correspondence and statements. The solution allows enterprises to generate new revenue sources, reduce costs, improve customer loyalty and meet compliance regulations.
• Social Brand Engagement – Enables enterprises to engage with new and existing customers to create community, driving brand loyalty and commitment on enterprise-owned digital properties in addition to public social media sites.
• Selection and Enrollment – Reduces online abandonment and time-to-market with effective product enrollment experiences and empowers business users to quickly set up and launch online enrollment experiences.
• Unified Workspace – Empowers customer-facing agents to provide superior service by getting fast access to critical information, enabling them to resolve inquiries and cases with accuracy and efficiency.

The Digital Enterprise Platform and Customer Experience Solutions will be highlighted at the first Adobe Digital Enterprise Summit, taking place October 3-4 at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. LIVE in Los Angeles. The Digital Enterprise Summit will feature industry thought leaders, Adobe experts and solution partners demonstrating the future of optimizing customer experiences across all digital channels. To learn more, visit the Adobe Digital Enterprise Summit page.

Quotes

Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Enterprise Solutions, Adobe

• “The ability to deliver superior customer experiences has become the imperative in achieving competitive advantage. The Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform provides a complete foundation for enterprises to truly engage with customers at every point of interaction, through solutions that are easier to use, more effective and productive, and more apt to delight the customer and promote brand loyalty.”

Kevin Zollinger, director of business integration, Nu Skin

• “With the Adobe Web Experience Management solution, Nu Skin can optimize the customer experience across channels, including mobile and social media. Our business managers can create more relevant, timely online conversations with customers, while our IT team can stay focused on strategic activities. Additionally, the new capabilities in the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform will help organizations such as ours take insights captured about customer behaviors on websites and use them to update content accordingly. This will help give customers access to the exact information they want, when and how they want it.”

Karl J. Uphoff, chief information officer, Global Consumer Lines, Chartis

• “When Chartis’ Private Client Group looked for new ways to expand and improve our relationship with customers, we collaborated with Adobe to produce an intuitive document-centric interface that utilizes Adobe’s Customer Experience Management solution capabilities. The result is a policy document electronic delivery platform, which advances our direct marketing efforts and enables customer self-service.”

Melissa Webster, program vice president, Content & Digital Media Technologies, IDC

• “Today’s leading organizations know that to stay at the forefront of the digital enterprise transformation, they must establish meaningful and lasting connections with their customers. This is especially challenging given the multiple channels through which customers now interact with businesses. What’s needed is a platform that provides businesses with a range of solutions designed to help them engage with their customers when, where and how the customers want, and lets them deliver an experience that keeps the customer coming back.”

Chris Davey, senior vice president, managing director and global head, Customer Engagement Platforms and Innovation, SapientNitro

• “Customer Experience Management empowers CMOs to transform brand marketing to enable stronger, more meaningful customer engagement across new digital, interactive channels. Together, SapientNitro and Adobe help our customers deliver personalized experiences across all touch-points that attract, engage, and convert targeted audiences. Using the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, SapientNitro is building solutions that dramatically improve how businesses manage customer experiences across multiple platforms in a unified context that drives tangible business results.”

Helpful Links

• Adobe CEM
• Blog Post from Adobe’s Rob Tarkoff
• Adobe Experience Delivers Blog
• Adobe CEM YouTube Channel
• Adobe Flash Builder

Availability

The Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform, Integrated Content Review solution, Web Experience Management solution and Customer Communications solution will be available August 2011. The Social Brand Engagement solution, Selection and Enrollment solution and Unified Workspace solution are available immediately in beta and will be generally available in fall 2011.

Adobe’s Ed Van Siclen talked to Sky Business News about the importance of Customer Experience Management (CEM) during a recent visit to Australia. I’ve talked to Ed on many occassions and seen him present. He clearly gets what CEM is all about and how organizations are taking advantage of the latest solutions Adobe is providing.

In this video Ed discusses the importance of providing a great online experience, multi channel, social and much more.. definitely worth a watch.

I know, I know, you can already open PDFs right? Google Chrome opens PDF files natively, Preview does an ok job on Mac OS X or you already have Reader 9 or earlier installed right.. why bother installing the Adobe PDF Reader? Lets have a look at the top 10 reasons you should put aside 10 minutes to download and install the latest free Adobe Reader X.

1. New user interface – Reader no longer gets in your way. If you open a PDF in the browser there are no clunky toolbars, you just get your PDF and even the standard browser zoom keys are supported. Nice!
2. Sandboxing – This is the safest way to view all those rich PDFs. The new sandbox (gory details here) protects you in much the same way as the latest version of Microsoft Office and Google Chrome do. If for whatever reason a hacker breaks into Reader, they are stuck in the sandbox and cannot hack your system.
3. Commenting - Reader supports both the highlighter tool and the popup note tool. Free! You dont even need the PDF to be created with Acrobat Pro like in previous versions. You can comment on ANY PDF as long as the author hasn’t restricted it via security or it is a dynamic PDF form.
4. Share – The new Share panel allows you to easily send the open document or other files via email or large files using Adobe’s new cloud based SendNow service. I use this all the time!
5. Latest PDF standards – Are you just crazy for standards? Reader X supports the latest PDF standards like PDF/A and ISO32000
6. Full support for Acrobat workflows – You can participate in real time document reviews initiated by Acrobat users without worrying about email attachments and multiple threads. As you comment on documents others can see it as well, and you can see their comments with a click of a button. You can even have a chat window open!
7. SharePoint integration – Use Microsoft’s Sharepoint solution? Now you can check PDF files out to let others know you are working on them, then check the file back in via a new menu option. Easy!
8. Fill in PDF Forms – Not just any PDF forms, but ones that shrink and grow depending the data you enter, making it easy for you to get it done and on to something else more enjoyable.
9. Reader Extensions – Acrobat users just love adding smarts to their PDFs that only Adobe Reader users can take advantage of. Things like drawing tools, stamps and more all light up when opened in Adobe Reader. PDF Forms created by Acrobat & LiveCycle users can even allow you to save the form partially filled out, and then come back to it later.
10. Open any PDF – Why have a PDF viewer that can’t read the latest and greatest? You’ll end up needing Adobe Reader anyway for Dynamic PDFs of all kinds including PDF Portfolios, Rights Managed PDFs, Dynamic PDF forms, rich PDF content that uses Flash and more.

All that in one application!  Download Adobe Reader X for free and don’t forget to update your parents PC too!

Upgrading a large amount of computers at once? Check out the IT Matters blog

Email, Browser, Login, Approve is just too long. I don’t know about you but it really bugs me when systems send me emails with links to a browser, which then asks me to authenticate, which then shows me a form that I need to approve. If the system is internal then I need to wait until i’m back in the office or conected via VPN. Ugh!

Adobe have updated the LiveCycle Mobile ES2 client for iOS to include support for the iPad’s extra screen real estate. Now you can fill out forms, approve tasks and navigate through LiveCycle Content services, Alfresco & SharePoint document libraries. This is extremely useful for people out in the field who need to approve tasks, initiate processes or access content on the fly!

Here is a quick video I recorded that demos some of the new capabilities on the iPad.

Have an iPad? Download the app now from the iTunes app store. If you had the existing app it should update!
There is also a version of this app for Android, Blackberry, iPhone & Windows Mobile!
Read more here: LiveCycle Workspace ES2 Mobile

About 3 years ago I wrote my first custom component for Adobe LiveCycle ES, a Twitter client, that allowed you to Tweet as part of a process orchestration. I’ve seen it crop up in quite a few demonstrations over time and find it to be a good example of how extensible Livecycle ES is. Until it broke. or rather, Twitter changed their authentication system to require oAuth, causing me to finally update the 3 year old code.

Times have changed for component development with LiveCycle. When I built the first version it involved manual creation of config file. Life is easy with the new LiveCycle Workbench ES Component Development Tool on Adobe Labs.

Here is the process I followed (Step 1-8 took less than 2 hours)

1. Open Eclipse
2. Stare at the screen for a minute
3. Google “Twitter oAuth Java”
4. Found “Scribe” and downloaded the library
5. Ran the sample Java code within Eclipse and confirmed it worked
6. Ran the LiveCycle Component Development Tool and created the wrapper project
7. “Stole” pieces of the Scribe sample code for the Livecycle component.
8. Deployed and tested the component in a process (it actually worked first go! Gasp!)
9. Wrote some documentation -> http://www.markszulc.com/blog/twitter-component-for-adobe-livecycle-es2-5/

Most of the time was spent futzing around trying to understand oAuth 2.0, so hopefully my docs above will make it easy to get the component up and running. The actual LiveCycle work took very little time.

Still to do

1. Better error handling – Twitter codes are returned, but I’m assuming internet connectivity :-/
2. More operations eg. direct tweet, reply etc
3. Consider making a Facebook & Foursquare version

Any feature requests? If you use it (even for a demo) let me know!

I’m seeing a lot of organisations adopt Microsoft’s SharePoint server lately and one common discussion point is around PDF workflows and how to support functions such as Check In / Check out etc. For those users out there, you’ll be please to know that Adobe has quite a few new ways for you to extend your SharePoint workflows into the world of PDF, including native support within Adobe Acrobat X and LiveCycle ES2.5

Check-in / Check-out support

Acrobat X allows users to support Checkin & out workflows. Acrobat will automatically prompt a user when they open a PDF file from within SharePoint and ask if they just want to open the file, or check it out and open. Acrobat then remembers the links to Sharepoint and will prompt the user to check the file back in when they close it. A new menu item will appear whenever a document is opened from Sharepoint allowing the user to access additional functions.

Good news for Adobe Reader users too.. this functionality is included in the free Adobe Reader X!

Review & Commenting on PDF documents.

Sharepoint can be used as a repository for all the correspondence during an Acrobat Shared Review. As long as all the users have permission and can access the Sharepoint server, the integration is quite easy. With a PDF file open in Acrobat 9 or Acrobat X, simply start the Shared Review wizard, select Sharepoint, select your workspace, then invite other users. Acrobat will upload the file to SharePoint and send out a download link to each invited user. From there on any user with Acrobat or Reader (if the initiator used Acrobat Pro) simply adds comments to the PDF and clicks “Publish My Comments” on the top right of the document.

All the comments  go back into Sharepoint automatically (just the small comment data, not the whole PDF) and all the other reviewers immediately get the new comments!

Acrobat Form Distribution

In much the same way as the Shared Review feature in Acrobat can use SharePoint, so too can PDF Forms. Simply run through the Distribute wizard, select SharePoint and upload and track your PDF Form submissions!

Server-side integration

LiveCycle ES2.5 now includes a connector for SharePoint 2007 & SharePoint 2010. By enabling this connector and configuring it to work with your LiveCycle installation, users can perform server-side conversions of native documents into PDF, invoke LiveCycle processes & secure information with LiveCycle’s Rights Management component.

Read more about the SharePoint Connector for Adobe LiveCycle ES

Demo

I recently recorded a 1 hour demonstration of most of what I’ve talked about above. Take a look and see how Sharepoint & Acrobat X (and a just a quick look at LiveCycle ES) work together: http://pacific.adobe.acrobat.com/p50957540/

Adobe today announced the availability of Adobe® LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite 2.5 (ES2.5), expanding the company’s set ofsolutions for delivering superior customer experiences. New capabilities in LiveCycle ES2.5 include enterprise mobility for improved multiscreen delivery of applications, an enhanced framework for building enterprise rich Internet applications (RIAs),and real-time collaboration to empower organizations to interact with customers and citizens in more meaningful, personal ways. Adobe is also announcing three next-generation Solution Accelerators to reduce development time and increase quality ofenterprise applications.

Improving Customer Experience One Customer at a Time

For organizations with complex multi-channel or multi-device customer contact requirements, IT systems are challenged to keep pace with mobile and social customer adoption and meet customer experience expectations. When customers encounter anegative experience, it undermines brand loyalty. When citizens encounter a negative experience, it impacts an agency’s ability to assist someone in need. Adobe LiveCycle ES2.5 enables organizations to provide their customers with consistent and contextual experiences across channels and devices according to their customers own preference.

• Adobe LiveCycle Mobile ES2, new to the LiveCycle ES2.5 family, extends process management, data capture, andcontent services to mobile devices, providing true enterprise mobility. LiveCycle Mobile ES2 easily integrates with back-end systems and enables intuitive mobile experiences for Android, Blackberry, iPhone and Windows Mobile devices.
• Organizations can also provide more social experiences by creating user-centric RIAs that embed real-time collaborationincluding chat, voice, video, screen and application sharing to their customers. For the developer, LiveCycle ES2.5 provides a standard toolset and methodology for design, modeling and development of user-centric enterprise RIAs.
• LiveCycle ES2.5 enhances company’s ability to improve customer service and operational efficiency by extending existing business processes to the point of customer interaction by leveraging the ubiquitous Adobe® Flash® Platform andAdobe® Reader®.

Expediting Time to Value for a Customer Experience Strategy

Adobe is releasing its next generation of Solution Accelerators for organizations that want to improve customer experience quickly. Built on LiveCycle ES2.5, Solution Accelerators kick-start project planning, decrease development time for production applications, and reduce risk with a supportable and upgradable framework. Solution Accelerators provide best  practice methodologies, solution templates, and building blocks to extend LiveCycle ES2.5. The three Solution Accelerators are:

• Correspondence Management Solution Accelerator: Enable business users to dynamically create personalized communications using pre-approved layouts and content to provide consistent, high quality customer correspondence such as creating a customized claims letter.
• Interactive Statements Solution Accelerator: Engage customers through communications that embed the power ofpersonalized RIAs in secure PDF formats, including credit card statements, telecommunications bills and electronic invoices.
• Managed Review & Approval Solution Accelerator: Enable multi-party participation in content review processes.

Pioneering Solutions for Social Web Content Management, Measurement Optimization and Visualization

Additional enhancements to Adobe’s solutions for customer experience management are planned through Adobe’s intent to acquire Day Software, a leader in Web experience management for the enterprise. The company expects to add dynamic andsocial Web content management solutions, as well as measurement, analytics and visualization tools into future versions of LiveCycle, providing a platform to create, deliver and optimize customer experiences. Organizations will be able to easily trackand analyze customer behavior and process metrics, enabling them to continually hone and improve applications and processes.Ultimately, Day Software’s leading Web solutions, combined with Adobe’s existing enterprise portfolio, will enable customers tobetter integrate their Web presence and business applications and unlock the value of multichannel communications acrossmarketing, sales and services.

What do you get when you combine Adobe LiveCycle ES2, Forms & Adobe AIR? Tetrapod!

Created by my Adobe colleagues in Poland, it provides your end users with desktop access to forms and other content via a simple menu system. Tetrapod exposes information stored in LiveCycle ES Content Services and initiates forms based processes in LiveCycle ES Process Management.

You can watch a presentation on Tetrapod here: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/tetrapod-demo/ or download Tetrapod and trial it yourself: http://devnet.host.adobe.com/download/tetrapod/ and finally a few extra videos on Tetrapod on Piotr Walczyszyn’s RIASPACE blog

Tetrapod Workflow from Piotr Walczyszyn on Vimeo.