Tucked away between major Adobe June announcements -- which included Acrobat 9's release -- the PDF mothership also slipped in Upgrade 1 to LiveCycle ES (enterprise suite), its set of J2EE (Java to Enterprise Edition) forms server applications that port paper processes to electronic ones. The update shipped July 17.

For those keeping score at home: In 2007, Adobe combined under the LiveCycle ES umbrella all the formerly separate enterprise products such as the PDF rights-management Policy Server and Reader Extensions, which unlocks features in the free Reader so customers can saved form-field data on their local hard drives. The update adds several new features that Adobe hopes will help distance the PDF-based, electronic versions of forms from paper counterparts:

• Automated conversion of 2D and 3D CAD data to PDFs, which will help companies securely pass engineering data among customers and vendors, and assign expiration dates for documents containing sensitive, proprietary content.
• Support for the PDF/A archiving standard, which includes date-and-time stamping and special handling for digital signatures
• AIR/Flash/Flex rich-Internet apps (RIAs) can be made and served via LiveCycle, making mass distribution and collection of data more automated.
• LiveCycle Content Services ES, an open-source enterprise content management (ECM) system based on Alfresco, embedded in the platform to manage forms data.

"Our strategy had been...to rely on [enterprise] content management (ECM) systems customers already had" via connectors to IBM or Documentum systems for example, says Raja Hammoud, Adobe LiveCycle group product marketing manager. "We found that, while it's important to continue to offer those connectors for companies who have standardized on those, many customers who already have ECM systems were not using them for automating end-to-end applications with LiveCycle."

Those who weren't, Hammoud says, had no enterprise-wide ECM system to connect with. Or if they did, found it too expensive and time-consuming to integrate LiveCycle processes with it. Instead, they were building their own UI for the forms and rolled their own back-end services to manage the data the forms brought in.

The idea behind extending RIAs to the enterprise forms, Hammoud says, is to make the electronic forms experience much more efficient and engaging than its static, paper counterpart.

"We're finding a ton of very manual processes that our customers are trying to move completely online," says Hammoud, who believes that RIAs offer a path to make complicated paper processes into simple online ones. She demonstrated a Flash app for a car-insurance company's accident report form -- including a map with which a customer could simply draw the dreaded "accident diagram" by dragging a few pointers and quickly illustrating which car was turning which direction in a hypothetical crash.

The concepts and implementation of this new rich-Internet stuff can be too new and overwhelming for IT departments, which might know data trafficking in their organizations like the back of their hands, but don't know Flex.

To stimulate the process of implementing RIAs -- and to show customers best-practice strategies perfected by early adopters -- Adobe also is rolling out what it calls Solution Accelerators, a combination of demos, code and tutorials usable by customers or consultants that don't necessarily need to start from scratch with their RIAs.

Pricing for LiveCycle ES starts around $75,000.