If you’re like me and have finally made the move to a 64bit version of Windows, be it Vista or Windows 7, you may have come across an annoying glitch related to PDF previews within Outlook 2007. Instead of displaying the PDF correctly you receive an error similar to “This file cannot be previewed because of an error with the following previewer: PDF Preview Handler for Vista -  To open this file in its own program, double-click it.”

Adobe Acrobat and Reader both come with Adobe PDF preview handlers for Outlook but the installer has a mistake which means the preview handler does not work on 64-bit systems. It turns out the problem can be fixed via a simple registry change.

All that needs to be done to correctly preview PDF docs in Outlook 2007 64bit is to first download the latest Adobe Reader, then add the following key to your registry;

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodeClassesCLSID{DC6EFB56-9CFA-464D-8880-44885D7DC193}]

"AppID"="{534A1E02-D58F-44f0-B58B-36CBED287C7C}"

The fix should only be applied to 64-bit versions of Windows that have Adobe Reader installed. Don’t apply the fix to 32-bit versions of Windows.  To install make it easier to configure, download the adobe_pdf_x64_fix, unzip then double-click the adobe_pdf_x64_fix.reg file and follow the prompts.

thanks to http://www.pretentiousname.com/adobe_pdf_x64_fix/index.html for this workaround..

The LiveCycle turnkey installer keeps making things easier for a developer to get started. Since the beta of the next version of LiveCycle is available to download for review I thought i’d share some advice on the install process.

LiveCycle is enterprise software, so you need to give it the same respect that you would if you were installing Seibel, SAP, Oracle or other large systems. What I mean by this is dont skimp on hardware.. give it a decent CPU and decent amount of ram (more on that in a moment) and heed the system requirements.

One thing I see happen all the time is that developers waste a lot of time trying to install LiveCycle into “their” environment, ie they neglect the turnkey install and spend many hours trying to bend LC into shape. Adobe’s engineers have spent quite a bit of time certifying roughly 65 combinations of operating system, database & app server, so there must be something to suit your needs, although my recommendation for kicking the tires is just to install the turnkey and start playing in less than an hour!

RAM – Seriously, if you are going to install all the various components of LiveCycle, be aware that they all take a slice of not just your system ram, but the more precious Java memory.It is quite easy to run out of Java Heap Space if running all the LiveCycle components on a 32 bit JVM, so run 64 bit Java if possible!

The new installer adds a new feature that streamlines the configuration of SSL on the turnkey JBoss install. SSL needs to be configured in order to use Rights Management securely. A lot of people get scared by this but here is a tip..

Simply enter the DNS name of your testing machine into the Common Name field. In my case I’ve installed on a VMWare image and I connect to my installation at the address vm.globalcorp.com.au even when connecting locally.

After the installer is complete, navigate to this folder;

C:<LiveCycleInstallPathjbossserverlc_turnkeyconf

and double click on “lces.cer”. You will be prompted to install the certificate. Do so, then navigate to the same address you put in the Common name field during the install (like my vm.globalcorp.com.au). Try the same address now with https://yourdnsname:8443

The installer has many new “checks” during the install to make sure you get things correctly setup, so take the time to read the erros if they show up. For instance, you need to have Acrobat installed if you intend to use the PDF Generator features, so the installer will check that Acrobat is correctly installed and visible to LiveCycle.

Finally, if you are looking for the deploy folder, the turnkey installer deploys to a new “lc_turnkey” server definition now instead of “all”

Have any extra tips for installing LiveCycle?  Add them to the comments!

My latest round of presentations across Australia have been based on the topic of “Lowering your costs while increasing business efficiency”. Clearly in the current economic climate we’ve seen many projects put on hold due to budget cuts, yet a more agile approach would be to start with some quick wins that were aligned to the “future vision”.

In the presentation I covered four key areas;

• Collaborating in real time in live meetings & training
• Requesting reviews & feedback of information with tracking
• Managing & controlling your content inside & outside of your organisation
• Using forms & process to collect structured information

Using a combination of Adobe Acrobat, Connect & LiveCycle ES technologies I showed many examples of how organisations can improve their business in a matter of days & weeks, rather than months and years. In fact, most of the case studies shown went live in around 6 weeks. Allowing business people to create more content and interact with each other in more engaging ways than just email has immediate benefits, without extensive training.

Here are my slides;

Apart from making the slides available, below is a link to the PDF Portfolio that was sent out to the attendees. Be patient as it’s a 95Mb download (chock full of videos) but all you need to view it is Adobe Reader 9.

Adobe Breakfast Presentation – PDF Portfolio

Today I presented a talk on how government can provide a more engaging experience to citizens. This was not a product presentation but more looking at general themes of what provides an engaging experience. The content was a mix of slides and demonstrations and is listed below.

Videos;

Alan Webber
Government technology and market strategist, Forrester Research

Anthony Steve
Manager of business.gov.au, Australian Government Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research

Customer successes – Kane County Circuit Court
Putting citizens first – County agency enhances services and streamlines collaboration across government offices.

Subset of demonstrations;

Obama Inaugeration Video
Searchable online video with synchronized transcript

Certified White House PDF
PDF document certified with a valid U SGovernment digital certificate to prove its authenticity.

Twhirl
An alternative way to view Twitter information rather than through a browser

SpreadTweet
Yet another Adobe AIR based Twitter client, but this one looks like a spreadsheet!

Australian journalist Brad Howarth recently interviewed me regarding my opinions on what Adobe is doing with Flash and has included my comments in an unbiased article recently published in February 20th B&T magazine.

Apart from choosing the technology that can get your message to as many people as possible, one key takeaway from the article is the importance of understanding the workflow between your developer and designers. This is especially important now that the demand for a great user experience is important.

Having creative people burn cycles slicing and dicing their artwork for developers is time consuming and costly. Developers cannot afford to ignore the user experience as there audience expect higher engagement and “that will do” is no longer an option. In fact, many projects are now start with a “front to back” approach (designing the user experience first then wiring it up behind) rather than the traditional “back to front” method which leaves the user interface as a final consideration.

Adobe has put an amazing amount of effort into the latest release of Creative Suite, CS4, that specifically targets these designer / developer workflows. New functionality such as being able to move from Photoshop to Fireworks to CSS compliant HTML in Dreamweaver are easier than ever before. Improvements such as Subversion support in Dreamweaver makes it even easier to sit alongside a dev project.

If you add to this that Flash is no longer constrained to a web browser and can be included in a desktop application (Adobe AIR) or inside a PDF (Acrobat 9) then all of a sudden your creative efforts have been leveraged across many different mediums.

While you can implement the new workflow improvements today, what many of you are waiting on anxiously is Flash Catalyst (previously codenamed Thermo). Catalyst will tighten the designer / developer workflow even more allowing true round tripping between tools.

While I intend to write a whole lot more about this, you can see a snippet of information held in the slides and samples from the recent Refresh event.

You can also read Brad’s full article by downloading the RTF files in Brad’s latest blog post. or purchasing the print edition as I did.

For the last week two weeks, Brian Chau, Andrew Spaulding and I have been traveling around Australia giving the web designer & developer community a “Refresh” on what’s happening with Adobe technology that is relevant in the web space.

For the keynote we covered a wide range of topics, starting with an overview of all the major releases that the Adobe Engineers have come up with in the last 12 months, including Flex 3, AIR, Acrobat 9, Acrobat.com, LiveCycle ES Update 1 as well as Creative Suite 4.

Demos shown include;
David Gilmour PDF – Flash Video recording inside a PDF.
Acrobat.com – Many things including free web conferencing!
FIAT ecoDrive – AIR application that talks with your car and tells you how you drive.
Telstra Business – Flex application used to choose a mobile phone.

After some quick demos showcasing the latest shipping technologies, we went on to discuss & demo the latest advances in Flash and how the complete Flash Platform is coming together as a collection of devices (desktops, laptops, mobile devices, set top boxes etc). Those in Melbourne & Brisbane were able to see the Sony PlayStation 3 display flash video content thanks to the built in Flash Player (Sydney had internet troubles!).

Andrew showcased some of the latest Flash examples;

Hobnox – A great audio tool.
“The Cloth Demo” – showing the performance of Flash 10
Flash Player 10 feature demos – Several more demos

We then covered the latest from the Open Screen Project before moving on to a very important topic, the Designer / Developer workflow. The most exciting part of this was Andrew’s demonstration of Flash Catalyst (previously known as Thermo). Andrew will be posting a recording of his demo soon.

Below are the slides from the keynote, which include plenty of information and links where you can find out more information.

Adobe Refresh 2009 was a great event for us, and I especially enjoyed the conversations with so many of you during the breaks. We still have the Auckland Refresh event coming up on March 5th, so if you can make it please register at http://events.adobe.co.uk/cgi-bin/event.cgi?country=pa&eventid=7651

This wont be the last web designer / developer activity from the Adobe Australia / New Zealand team this year. We’re in planning mode right now for some rather fun and informative activities that will be announced rather soon…

Over the last few weeks Andrew Spaulding & I met up with a handful of Australian Web Developers and Designers in both Sydney & Melbourne. I put together this video on what they do, their opinions of Adobe technology and what they think about the Australian community and its potential.

Featured in the video are
Robin Hilliard from Rocket Boots, Todd Trevillion from Gruden, freelancer Andrew Muller, Andrew Apostola from Portable Content, Glen Peterson of Cummins Nitro and
Chris Maisano from Citrus

There is a lot of great work happening out there and its good to see such a vibrant selection of talent. We’ll be doing more interviews over the next few months so if you’d like to show off what you do let me know!

Slides from this week’s presentation in Canberra on LiveCycle Designer ES, including some pointers on creating accessible forms from Adobe’s Andrew Kirkpatrick;

Note that the workshop was mostly hands on demonstration, so the slides are minimal.

Adobe is hosting a free full day workshop at the Canberra Convention Centre on Tuesday 3rd February. If you keep wondering what the big deal with Acrobat (it only makes PDF right? Wrong!) or never really understood what Adobe LiveCycle was for, then come along and say hi.

The first part of the workshop is presented by Adobe colleagues Lindsay Brown and Adam Jeske. They will cover how to get the most out of Adobe Acrobat 9, including how to create accessible content, interactive presentations and use the new built in Flash runtime to create PDF portfolios.

At 1pm I’ll be taking over and presenting a two hour deep dive on building forms with LiveCycle Designer, as well as a quick look at how to take the new form and add a Flash based form guide and add workflow with the rest of the LiveCycle suite. Even if you have current budget issues, I’ll talk about how you can leverage the Business.gov.au SmartForms hosted service to get your smart forms hosted.

The full session breakdown of the workshop is listed in the attached PDF, and although it is free you will need to register to attend.

Adobe Workshop Registration Form

This week I did a quick 3 city tour in Australia covering Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. While many people assume that Adobe LiveCycle is solely for electronic forms creation, there are many other components which combined with Adobe Reader, Flash Player and AIR, can create great Communication “Experiences” for customers & citizens.

This week’s presentation focused around three key areas; Information, Process & People. The information section covered everything from managing unstructured data with LiveCycle Content Services, securing information using LiveCycle Rights Management and ensuring it’s authenticity using certified pdfs. The process part focused on automation capabilities of LiveCycle, including the process management capabilites, LiveCycle Workspace and Business Activity Monitoring tools. Finally I had a look at the most important “People” side of the equation, showing how we can empower not only our customers with great experiences, but also our internal business community with simple to use interfaces.

My slide deck is shared above, and I’ll be recording my presentation in sections over the next few days and will place links on my blog.