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.

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.

Adobe recently released two new Solution Accelerators, groups of code, documentation and samples to extend the LiveCycle ES product suite closer down the solution path.  These releases are essentially the result of work done by an internal Adobe team using LiveCycle, Flex & AIR to create some quick start and best practise samples to help customers and solution partners get closer to a deliverable.

One interesting area addressed by this release is around Correspondence Management, and how Adobe can help address the needs of organisations requirements to correspond with their customers, or government agencies with their constituents. From the guide itself;

“For many companies and government agencies, correspondence is the face of the organization. Whether
it’s a welcome letter to a new customer, a bill for an insurance premium, or a summary of benefits or
services, document-based communications—correspondence—serve as one of the most important, and
costly, vehicles for communicating with customers and citizens.”

One of my colleagues from Adobe France, Francois Massemin, has posted this YouTube video demonstrating some of the user experiences that can be provided using a combination of Adobe Flex & PDF.

Correspondence Management involves orchestrating the creation, personalization, assembly and delivery

of these communications, be they electronic or paper-based. Typically this involves three different types of correspondence:Human-interactive correspondence, Programmatic correspondence & Structured correspondence. What I like about the video is that it shows examples of using the best tools for the job. If you need a PDF so you can print, send, store something as a document, then use that format. If you need a dynamic interface, then Flex can be used, but ultimately both can be combined to form a great solution.

The Correspondence Management Solution Accelerator can be downloaded for free from Adobe.com and evaluated with the trial release of LiveCycle ES Update 1.  For more information on this Accelerator as well as the Account Enrollment release check out Adobe.com.