Feature
Managing the Experience
When you are developing business applications there are two groups you really need to consider -- the customer and your employee. If your customer facing applications are complicated for the customer, they aren't going to use them, which means they aren't going to buy products and/or services from you.
Likewise, if you make the background processes difficult for your employees, productivity is going to be low and frustrations will run high. Not a good situation if these employees also deal with your frustrated customers.
Adobe's Customer Experience Suite is a platform that unites all of Adobe's capabilities for building and deploying customer-face applications that make it easier to do business, which in turn drives more businesses.
Adobe Customer Experience Management
Adobe's Livecycle Enterprise Suite 2.5 is one component of this platform, offering the ability to design and build business applications that provide the best user experience for the customer, while at the same time making the work of your employees less complicated.
Livecycle ES 2.5
Livecycle ES2 was unveiled at Adobe Max 2009, so it only makes sense that this latest version was unveiled yesterday at the opening of Adobe Max 2010. Livecycle ES2.5 offers some new modules to support building engaging experiences -- including mobile -- and a new/updated set of Solution Accelerators that can be deployed much easier.
New Mobile Clients
In the previous version of Livecycle there was mobile capability. But it has been expanded to offer more capabilities and support more mobile platforms.
In addition to the ability to browse for content and view/approve tasks, with Adobe Livecycle Mobile ES2, users can now also initiate requests and tasks from their mobile device and they can complete forms.
There's been a bit of work on the mobile client front as well. Adobe is providing mobile clients for the the major mobile platforms including Android, Blackberry, iPhone, WebOS and soon, Windows Phone 7. So it doesn't matter what device you prefer, mobile access is at your fingertips.
For Android users, there is an added bonus: you also have voice search and the ability to capture live photos.
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
Jun
6
The Future of Social Media: Emerging Trends and How to Stay Ahead of the Curve
The impact of emerging technologies like AI on social media
Webinar
Jun
7
The Building Blocks of Personalization
This webinar will explore how personalization can create powerful ecommerce shopping experience.
Webinar
Jun
8
Attracting—and Keeping—Your High-Net-Worth Investors
Join PwC to dissect their recent survey findings on a specific customer subset — high-net-worth investors.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
13
Learn How to Deliver Dynamic Video Experiences at Scale
Learn how to convert existing assets into video experiences in near real-time.
Webinar
Jun
20
3 Steps to Unlock Your Customer Data and Drive Revenue
Discover how Twilio Segment’s #1 Customer Data Platform helps implement data-driven strategies.
Capture photos for your business process on the Android
New Solution Accelerators
Adobe's Solutions Accelerators for Livecycle ES2.5 are no longer free. They are now supported frameworks that provide an upgrade path for future releases. Accelerators also now have a single price and single package, so you don't have to figure out what ES modules you need to purchase to run the framework.
ES2.5 offers a few new and improved set of accelerators including:
- Managed Review and Approval: this is an existing SA that has been updated to the supported framework. It provides multi-stages, deadlines, approvals and requirements tracking of tasks.
- Correspondence Management: this is a completely re-architected version of the old correspondence management solution, including ad-hoc and batch personal communications, digital signatures and it can include interactive forms.
- Interactive Statements: a completely new solution that offers an interactive experience for users to view their statements online. You can drill down into the details of your statement, even kick off automated business processes such as requesting a review of a particular item on your statement. Targeted interactive advertising is another capability, as is a payment calculator.
New Connectors
SharePoint 2010: Livecycle ES 2.5 can now connect to SharePoint 2010. View and act on Livecycle tasks from within SharePoint, or initiate Livecycle tasks to get processes started. In addition you can find, render and prepopulate forms and guides.
Customer Experience Management Today
According to Adobe, Customer Experience Management (CEM) is about how you make it easier for people to do business with you. And that's the key, making the user experience the best it can be so that your customers want to continue to work with you. Livecycle ES 2.5 is a unique platform that you don't really see duplicated in other applications today.
That doesn't mean that there isn't competition out there. Both Oracle and IBM have widely talked about their CEM platforms, IBM just recently announcing theirs. Adobe brings a wide mix of capabilities to the table that includes their strong focus on client tools and technologies that support richer interfaces (Adobe Reader 8.0 -- used with Interactive Statements -- is one of these).
It will be interesting to see how Day's Web Content Management platform and other capabilities fit into Adobe's CEM framework going forward. The added capabilities should only make the framework that stronger. It won't be too long before we know for sure..
