The LiveCycle Collaboration Service (nee Cocomo) team have been hard at work and have just announced their latest set of capabilities including screensharing, record & playback and a new javascript sdk. If you are new to LCCS, its a great service that is part of the LiveCycle family and allows Flash, Flex and now HTML developers to build collaborative features such as text chat, audio / video and application control sharing right into their own applications.

This release extends the goal of the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite to enhance intuitive application experiences with the backend integration and collaboration features needed for enterprise apps to come to life and actually enrich rather than hinder the users ability to get their task done.

Screensharing is cool and has so many uses. We already have customers deploying this into customer care environments. Imagine being able to log a support call and after granting permission to the customer service rep start a screen sharing session right in the application. Much more engaging, faster issue resolution time, and far more convenient than having the user navigate to seperate screensharing technology. I can en

ge Record & Playback being used for tutorial work, archiving interactive sessions for compliance reasons among others.

Developers can try the service free of charge, and due to the fact that this is a hosted service, you can begin adding collaborative features to your apps minutes after downloading the SDK. Adobe also has various pricing options for the production use of the service.

Want to read more? Check out the Collaborative Methods blog

Want to get started? Download the SDK at http://collaboration.adobelivecycle.com/

Attending Flash Platform Code Camp in New Zealand? Join my session and learn how to get started!

Acrobat 9 introduced the concept of PDF Portfolios, branded Flash based containers that allow the user to navigate through the files / content contained within the PDF. The portfolio is defined by a navigator, and these navigators are built using Flex. Adobe is running a competition where you could win great prizes by using your Flex skills to build a custom PDF portfolio. Check out these great prizes!

Contest First Place Winner:
Choice of either a Dell Adamo Desire or MacBook Air 2.13GHz

Second Place Winner:
Apple iPad wifi, 3G 32GB device

Third Place Winner:
HP Mini 5102 device

Top 10 entries:
Featured on Adobe.com**

Sweepstakes drawing:
Amazon Kindle

A panel of Adobe Acrobat experts will select 10 finalist entries. Representatives from several leading brand agencies and RIA design firms will then review the top 10 entries and select 3 winning entries. This is a great way to get your work in front of agencies looking for creative developers.

Australian entries are definitely welcome.. make us proud!

Full details are at http://www.acrobatusers.com/navigator-contest

For quite a few months now Adobe has been talking up Flash Builder, Flex 4 & ColdFusion Builder, but with the caveat that these tools were in beta.  Each of the betas made available via Adobe Labs added new features and allowed you to test and provide feedback to the product teams. Today, however, Adobe is announcing the immediate availability of the production versions of the following!

Flex 4 – Including the new Spark skinning and component architecture enabling a new level of expressiveness in RIAs in addition to supporting the new Flash Catalyst to Flash Builder workflow.

Flash Builder 4 – There are over 90 new features in this release, and you can use them with both Flex 3 and Flex 4 to gain big improvements in development time, integration and building more expressive apps. (Note: Please be sure to uninstall any FB4 beta SW before installing the release product)

ColdFusion Builder – This new Eclipse-based IDE for ColdFusion development is deeply integrated with ColdFusion 9 in addition to making it fast and easy for CF developers to create Flex applications with integration between ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder.

The following is a list of resources where you can find out more information;

• Read Andrew Shorten’s Flex Team Blog post
• Get Flash Builder 4 (remember to uninstall any FB4 beta SW first)
• AdobeTV: Learn what developers like about Flash Builder in this video from Flash Camp Boston from March 19th
• AdobeTV: David Wadhwani, VP and GM of Adobe’s Platform BU introduces new Flash Platform  products
• Test drive Flex 4 – Take the Flex Test Drive: Build an application in an hour and learn about Flex 4 using this new guided, video tutorial
• Flex-in-a-week free video training – New for Flex 4
• Get ColdFusion Builder
• Video: ColdFusion Builder Feature Tour
• Flex product info on adobe.com
• ColdFusion product info on adobe.com

Lots of new toys to play with! Make sure you let me know what you’ve built.

David Harris from the Auckland ColdFusion User Group has organised a User Group meeting that coincides with my visit to Auckland this week. This means I’ll be able to show off some of the new Adobe tools!

The meeting is being held at the Auckland Media Design School and I’ll be first showing the new Flash Catalyst beta, the upcoming improvements in Flash Builder (was Flex Builder) & ColdFusion and even a quick look at the new LiveCycle Data Services beta.

The feedback on these new products has been very positive,  so come see what the fuss is about, share a beer (David assures me that there will be at least one!), and network with other Designers & Developers.

Register here: http://nzroadshow.eventbrite.com/

The engineers at Adobe have been working hard and hot on the heals of the Flash Catalyst & Flash Builder 4 public betas comes another release for you to have a look at and provide feedback on.

LiveCycle Data Services 3 beta (LCDS3) is the next major release of the server based product that allows for remoting, messaging & data management. If you are new to this product, LiveCycle Data Services extends the open source Blaze project, which enables a “real time web” experience that can push content to the Flash Player rather than polling. Beyond what comes with Blaze, LCDS3 allows extra features like PDF generation, data management and is a fully supported offering from Adobe. Adobe has beefed up tooling by adding plug ins for Flash Builder and simplified developing flex applications. You can now develop new fully functional flex applications with no server code in under 10 minutes!

By adding extra features to Flash Builder 4, currently in beta, LiveCycle Data Services 3 enables developers to graphically build their data model and define relationships between entities. It is also possible to import a model directly from an existing database table via built in RDS support.

Once the data model is defined, it can be deployed to the LiveCycle Data Services instance running on the server, which will utilise Hibernate to handle all CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. In other words, you don’t have to worry about a lot of that “server stuff”, LCDS will call the database and send the results to your Flash app in real time!

There are a few videos to help you get started http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/videos/ and there are plans to add more. You can download LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3 public beta here on http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/.

Today on labs.adobe.com, Adobe made available preview releases of the next version of two  tools in the Adobe Flash Platform. Of these two tools, one is an upgrade from a previous version (Flash Builder), and another is a completely new tool (Flash Catalyst).

Flash Catalyst is an incredible new tool from Adobe that aims to bridge the gap between developer & designer workflows. Traditionally designers hand over artwork as still images or “sliced up” assets to a development team that then need to go ahead and attempt to reassemble the assets as intended. I say attempt, as often it is very time consuming if not impossible for a developer to recreate the intent the designer had.

Designers can now continue to use familiar tools such as Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator to design, then use Flash Catalyst to add interaction to their design while at the same time moving the project into something a developer can use. Flash Catalyst converts artwork into a Flex project which can be opened up in Flash Builder and extended by developers.

Flash Builder 4 (formerly known as Flex Builder) is the latest version of the Eclipse based IDE that allows developers to build applications that execute in the Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR or even within a PDF. Renaming Flash Builder links the product into the Flash Platform, something that the name Flex often missed, yet it will continue to leverage the Flex framework to make it quick and easy for developers to build Rich Internet Applications

Developers will benefit from the new features in Flash Builder 4, including support for projects built in Flash Catalyst, round trip support for Flash Professional CS4, coding enhancements, service introspection and more.

As both of these tools are now on Adobe Labs as available free of charge technical preview, it is a great idea to download and test these tools to see how they assist your workflows, but equally important that you provide feedback to the product teams so they can make the tools meet your needs.

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!

Over the weekend Australia’s ANZ Bank went live with their first few forms built with Adobe LiveCycle ES. PDF Forms you may think? Meh says some? No no no.. check out these great Flash based forms;

https://apply2.anz.com/au/savings/onlinesaver/ [Updated]

http://apply.onedirect.com.au/savings

So what makes the forms so special and customer friendly?  Well consider the following features of the form and compare it to your last web form experience;

1. Smooth form flow – The user has control and can move back and forth between form sections as it suits them and there is no need to wait for browser refreshes etc as the content is rendered in the Adobe Flash Player.
2. Guided transitions between panes – The user is visibly guided from one section to the next
3. Rich form experience – Easy to use form with contextual based help to assist the user in filling in the form
4. Contextual based help to assist the user in filling in the form – Immediate non-evasive error reporting using the Flex validation techniques – Don’t just tell the user that they made a error, show them where and why.

What are the benefits to ANZ by using LiveCycle ES and Form Guides?

1. Easy to add additional features/offers – The forms can be maintained without developers by using LiveCycle Designer ES
2. Easy to turn into new products – Branded templates built for the new forms above can now be reused to bring new products to market quickly and easily.
3. Options to embed interactive Flash advertisements, Flash video etc – Create a great branded application process and guide customers through the experience. The form guides are based on Adobe Flex and can be extended using Adobe Flex Builder
4. Reusable template to allow form developers to concentrate on form logic and not worry about the UI, resulting in reduced development time and costs
5. Easy to white label for multi branding

But hang on.. i’m a Flex developer.. can’t I just use Flex Builder?

Well of course, and for many developers this will be the path you take, however for large organisations with many many forms, maintaining all that code can be cumbersome, and as a developer do you really want to be bothered opening up old projects just to change some wording for some business user standing over your shoulder?  No.. the trend in enterprise is to give power back to the business community. LiveCycle Designer allows you to capture the power of Flex and place it into reusable templates that business users and form designers can quickly create forms with.

This is a great start for such an innovative bank and I hear this is just the beginning for ANZ’s online status.

Adobe has announced the upcoming release of LiveCycle ES Update 1. While this is a very important and interesting release, its focus is on overall improvements while adding a few new features along the way.

Whats new?
There are two significant new features that have been added to the LiveCycle platform, 3D PDF Generation & Content Management. The LiveCycle PDF Generator 3D ES addition allows server side creation of PDF documents with full 3D objects inside.. nothing new for PDF, but great for organisations that wish to automate this. LiveCycle Content Services ES is the result of a partnership with open source content management leaders Alfresco. This means that now LiveCycle has a perfect combination of eForms, Process Management & Content Management that is preintegrated out of the box. Need to trigger a process on content? Easy.. just call the LiveCycle Process in the CM web UI! Need to add Livecycle Rights Management to a PDF? Easy, just select the option!

What’s improved?
Where do I start? Process Record and playback, Improved Dev / Stage & Prod migration workflows, Business Calendars, Out of Office, Acrobat 9 & Flex 3 support, lots of tweaks to LiveCycle Designer and more, more, more.

This new release has some great new functionality to offer and I can’t wait to share some of the samples I’ve been building with you all.. meanwhile read more in the press release.