Adobe Livecycle Designer Support

“LiveCycle” is a pun on the words “life cycle”. At least for Adobe’s branding team, it is meant to suggest the life cycle of business processes and customer interactions.

With Adobe LiveCycle Designer, authors can lock down form design templates and restrict access rights only to certain users. In addition, Adobe LiveCycle Designer allows people to design forms that can be used with digital signature technologies to encrypt data and form templates, validate signatures, and facilitate secure electronic transactions. Adobe LiveCycle Designer is part of Adobe's authoring tools family, providing you with a professional form designing software solution with support for XML data and schema bindings. It bundles a. LiveCycle Developer Center LiveCycle ES Developer Center - Help Adobe LiveCycle ES3 Help Content Below is a list of all Adobe Livecycle ES3 help content To use the enhanced interactive list, enable JavaScript in your browser. Extended technical support for Adobe LiveCycle will be available through March 2020. If organizations elect to purchase Extended Support, the Annual Support Fee for the first year and / or the renewal (second year), is an additional 25% of the Annual Support fee for the current renewal term. For details, see Adobe’s Support Lifecycle Policy.

To IT operations teams the world over, Adobe’s LiveCycle is Java J2EE-based server-side software that runs on most major server operating systems (Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX) and three major J2EE application servers (IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, Red Hat JBoss). It is designed to integrate with and fit into existing enterprise infrastructure software such as databases (Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Sun MySQL), directories (Microsoft Active Directory, Sun ONE, IBM Tivoli, Novell eDirectory) and e-mail (Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes).

The name itself had its beginnings in “Live Paper Server”. Along the way, it was also the “Intelligent Document Platform” or IDP.

Adobe Livecycle Designer Support Software

Here is Google’s News Archive Timeline for the word. First mention (in an Adobe context) occurs on June 8, 2004.

People who have installed and configured LiveCycle would have noticed “IDP” in the JNDI name of the LiveCycle data source IDP_DS. That stands for Intelligent Document Platform_Data Source. What is today ‘Rights Management’ was ‘Policy Server’ at one time and started life as “Enterprise Document Control” or EDC. Hence the JNDI name for the data source EDC_DS.

For Internet history buffs, the Wayback Machine is a good place to go snoop. Many of the links in this blog entry are to the Wayback Machine. If you get an error on your first try, it is probably because of trouble with intermediate proxy servers and caching. Try again and again and chances are that your requests will eventually succeed.

Designer

Four distinct stages are evident in LiveCycle’s evolution so far although these stages overlap one another from a timeline perspective.

ONE-OFF SERVERS (2001 and earlier)
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Adobe’s early efforts produced one-off server products that fit desktop functionality into a server model.

Content Server
April 10, 2001 press release announcing Content Server 2.0

Graphics Server
September 9, 2002 press release announcing Graphics Server 2.0

Distiller Server
December 17, 2001 press release announcing Distiller Server 5.0

Document Server
Oct 21, 2002 press release announcing Document Server.

Acrobat Elements Server
November 17, 2003 press release announcing Acrobat Elements Server.

ENTERPRISE PLAY WITH ACQUISITIONS (Jan 2002 – May 2004)
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Adobe starts implementing a planned enterprise strategy, driven by acquisitions.

Acquisition : Accelio Corporation (formerly JetForm)
http://www.accelio.com
February 1, 2002
Announces plan to acquire Accelio Corporation of Ottawa, Canada. It described itself as “a leading global provider of Web-enabled business process solutions”. Accelio’s technology and experience formed the basis for Form Server and Form Designer. Accelio’s sizable Professional Services team also formed the core of Adobe’s Professional Services team, since renamed Adobe Consulting.
April 15, 2002
Completes the acquisition.
For a detailed story on the acquisition, please see the September 2004 issue of Canadian Business magazine online.

Acquisition : Yellow Dragon Software
http://www.yellowdragonsoft.com
November 5, 2003
Adobe acquires Yellow Dragon Software of Vancouver, British Columbia, a self-described ” leader in the development and implementation of ebXML, an open standard technology”.

Acquisition : Q-Link Technologies, Inc.
http://www.qlinktech.com
May 3, 2004
Adobe acquires Q-Link, a privately held company based in Tampa, Florida. At their website, it claimed to have the “leading Business Process Management development platform and the fastest solution for delivering process-driven applications.” This technology formed the basis of LiveCycle Workflow/Process Management.

Release : 6.0 August 2004
First release was numbered 6.0 to synchronize with the then shipping version of Adobe Acrobat which was 6.0 (PDF 1.5). Also, the previous release of Form Server from Accelio (C++ based) was 5.0 although Form Server 6.0 was a re-write.
– Form Manager
– Form Server (history at Anthony Rumsey’s blog)
– Reader Extensions Server

BRAND LIVECYCLE WITH INDIVIDUAL PRODUCTS (June 2004 to May 2007)
——————————————————————————————————–
The brand “LiveCycle” is devised and introduced. All products are now prefixed with LiveCycle, for example, LiveCycle Policy Server.

Release : 7.0 July 2005
Form Server renamed to Forms, and the word “Server” removed from Reader Extensions Server.
New products added to the family :
– Policy Server
– Document Security
– Workflow
– Assembler
– Barcoded Forms ST (stand alone, non-Java (C++), Windows-only)

An Adobe press release from September 6, 2005

Release : 7.2 November 2006
J2EE Clusters now supported although configuration is manual.
New products added to the family:
– Print
– PDF Generator

Adobe Livecycle Designer Training

COMMON SERVICE ARCHITECTURE (June 2007 to August 2011)
——————————————————————————–
Release : Enterprise Suite (ES) (8.0) June 2007
Major re-architecture towards SOA, document service container introduced, Form Manager shelved, added Flex-based Workspace user desktop and Eclipse-based Workbench developer IDE. Installation simplified with a robust LiveCycle Configuration Manager (LCM). Solution Components (formerly called “products”) now are aware of one another.

Policy Server renamed to “Rights Management”. Document Security renamed to “Digital Signatures”. Barcoded Forms ported to J2EE and runs on all supported operating system platforms.

All solution components now have a “LiveCycle prefix and an “ES” suffix, for example, LiveCycle Rights Management ES.

Release : ES Update 1 (8.2)
LiveCycle entered the 64-bit world with support for 64-bit JDKs from Sun (HotSpot), IBM (J9) as well as BEA (JRockit). It is IP v6-compliant. LiveCycle Configuration Manager (LCM) now automatically configures J2EE clusters (except a JBoss).

Release : ES2 (9.0)
It had several architectural enhancements. PDF Generator conversions of native Microsoft Office documents are now multi-threaded. Configuration of the J2EE appserver is simplified because JMS (Java Messaging Service) is no longer used and therefore not required to be configured. This is a big deal for WebSphere environments where JMS configurations are complicated. J2SE version 1.6 is supported, along with 1.5. 32-bit JDK support is very limited. The Turnkey install for Oracle WebLogic has been discontinued.

Adobe Livecycle Designer Cost

Release : ES2.5 (9.0.0.0 SP2)
This is the current shipping release. Adobe attempts to reduce time to deployment with the introduction of three “solution accelerators” (SAs), a new version of Workbench (v9.5) and SP2. In accordance with Adobe’s strategic decision to build out a large partner ecosystem, the SAs are designed to enable partners to be able to offer repeatable solutions to their respective clients. The SAs are “Interactive Statements”, “Managed Review and Approval” and “Correspondence Management”.

Acquisition : Day Software AG
Adobe acquired Day Software Holding AG based in Basel, Switzerland in October 2010 (it was announced in July, 2010). With this acquisition, Adobe’s portfolio of enterprise software products included CQ5 (Web Content Management – WCM) and CRX (a Java Content Repository – JCR). CQ is short for the original name of the product – Communique. CRX is an acronym for Content Repository eXtreme.

Retirement : Adobe retires the “LiveCycle” brand and folds its functionality into the new “Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform” (ADEP) brand.

Adobe® LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite 4 (ES4) extends business processes to your mobile workforce and customers, increasing productivity while broadening service access to any user equipped with a desktop, smartphone, or tablet.


Adobe XML Forms Architecture (XFA)

The Adobe XML architecture combines the powerful data and business logic capabilities of XML with the rich presentation capabilities of Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF). For more information, see Adobe XML forms specifications.

Adobe Central Output Server family

Documentation for Central Output Server and previous generation products is installed with the product.

For additional topics and references, see Adobe Central Output Server family resources.

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