Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Uberity, LiveCycle and Mobile Forms

I get pinged a lot asking if we have any "LiveCycle Developers for hire".  At Uberity we also get asked this a lot.  The blog post referenced above explain what we can and cannot do but failed to mention training and mobile.  One of the key offerings that I believe any enterprise software company can give is training and knowledge transfer to their customers.  It is one thing to go into a customer and install a system or solution, but there is an onus to train the customer how to use it.  We believe this is an essential part of any LiveCycle deal.

With Adobe LiveCycle, we see a repeatable pattern of people who have bought LiveCycle ES and also are not using it to the full potential.  This means they are not getting the most optimal return on their IT investment.  Learning LiveCycle is daunting however.  If you want to really get good at it, there are about 20 different course modules to take.  One of the most recent patterns that is emerging is the aspect of mobile devices.

Mobile and LiveCycle ES

We have started building our own technology platform that will compliment LiveCycle ES.  Going to mobile or wireless devices from LC ES is also a challenge.  There is a mistaken belief that PDF or XDP forms can work for this.  Even if it did work, it is most certainly not the right solution.  Adobe is rumoured to be brewing up an in house way to round trip from LiveCycle to Mobile but the reality is that most companies will use only a small subset of mobile features and the first iteration will likely focus on forms.  Uberity has build up a set of native components and functionally re-usable code module that can be leveraged for those who want fast applications that can access low level API's on various mobile systems.  We firmly believe that we are doing is a superior solution, just potentially more costly for the end user.  To help people understand the issues, we published a white paper entitled "Mobile Application Development Strategies which is free to download and share.

If your organization is considering such patterns, please come and talk to us by emailing info at uberity dot com.  We don't bite (well usually).  If you need it fast, we can help.