LiveCycle ES Hosted Beta is now Live!

I got a great internal email today from Matt MacKenzie. In preparation for the next release of LiveCycle ES, Adobe is running a pre-release program and we invite you (see qualifier) to participate. We are providing our strategic customers and partners with early access to a hosted LiveCycle ES system on LiveCycle Developer Express to ensure an exciting and high quality release.

What’s new?

A vast number of improvements have been made to LiveCycle ES. A sample of some of the new features includes:

· Improved development and authoring tools, including the introduction of Action Wizard in LiveCycle Designer and changes to Process Designer to make team development possible and process design more intuitive

· Improved end-user experience development including LiveCycle ES Service Discovery for Flex Builder and a re-engineered Form Guide Builder

· Improved support for document assembly of XDP-based documents as well as PDF Portfolios including a new Document Builder interface to generate DDX commands

· Improved administration and platform maturity with improved backup and recovery support (hot backup), Health Monitor, expanded platform, database, and full 64 bit JVM support

· Improved out of the box solutions for Review and Commenting workflows which include Content Services

How do I get involved?

The goal of this early preview of the next version of LiveCycle ES is to provide our preferred customers and partners with the opportunity to preview the next release of LiveCycle ES. By participating, you will have access to:

· “What’s new” presentation

· Feature Spotlights (short recording of LiveCycle ES engineers presenting the new features)

· Access to your own hosted system with LiveCycle ES Server and Workbench pre-configured

· Test cases that will guide you through the new product areas accompanied with a survey to collect your feedback

While we always strive to drive quality releases, the goal of this early preview is to collect your valuable feedback on the usability enhancements that we have added to this new release. We will also be running a public beta in early summer to solicit testing and quality feedback.

TO DO: Immediately register yourself in the pre-release program here <http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=prerelease_interest> to ensure you get access to this early preview of the next release of LiveCycle ES. Please note that it may take up to 24 hours to activate your account.

How to get started?

Once you have registered, you will receive an email confirmation with information on how to access the prerelease.adobe.com site. Adobe is taking another big step in cloud computing by offering you a completely hosted environment to test our early version of our next release. We have our prerelease.adobe.com site ready to go which will provide you with access to a hosted system, support forums, bug & enhancement logging and tracking, documentation, etc.

Access to the hosted server on the LiveCycle Express system is very easy. Log on to the prerelease.adobe.com site where you will find a short welcome note. Here you will find a link to our Getting Started page that contains all of the information you need to get started with your very own hosted system.

Some guidance:

The prerelease site supports online forums. Please use the forums when you have a general question or suggestion that you feel other testers can benefit from. We would also encourage you to look at the forum posts prior to submitting a question, as someone may have already found an answer.

If you have questions or need help, please contact me at dnickull at adobe dot com.

We look forward to your feedback and appreciate the time and energy that is invested to help improve the quality and usability of our product