LiveCycle Automates PDFs
This form-design tool can help you automate your small business.
LiveCycle Designer 7 lets you build e-business-friendly forms.
At first glance, Adobe LiveCycle Designer 7 appears to be simply an easy-to-use tool for designing PDF forms that replace the paper ones you currently use. But it's actually capable of much more, and it may change the way you run your small business.
LiveCycle Designer ($349 stand-alone; $449 as part of Adobe Acrobat Professional 7) can help small companies participate in the automated trading networks that big corporations already use to manage orders, optimize warehouse inventory levels, and organize logistics services.
I tested a shipping version of the product and quickly mocked up a purchase order form, positioning boxes and lists onto a grid by dragging and dropping. Then I opened the XML schema definition of a purchase order specified by RosettaNet (a consortium of high-tech manufacturers), and dragged the appropriate data definitions to bind them to the fields in the form. Working in JavaScript, I added rules to ensure a completed form.
To use the resulting XML documents, I would need to exchange them with trading partners, using a protocol like Web Services or EDI. Adobe falls short of supplying the full solution here, but the company is courting outside providers to fill the service gap.
Mapping your company's business practices to the outside world's view of a standard document is tricky, even with LiveCycle. But the program is a major step toward bringing the benefits of e-business to smaller companies.