Confused about Designer ES vs full suite...

[Dave_TC]

Hi,

I've been trying to figure this our myself by researching all of the available documentation, but I am getting very confused by all of the different products, capabilities and installation/deployment requirements.  I need to determine if we need to purchase the full ES suite and establish a J2EE application server on Windows 2003 Server, or can we just use Designer ES on our Windows XP workstations to create PDF forms that our clients can open and modify using Adobe Reader.

For our project (Canadian Government department), we simply want to have dynamic PDF forms that can be populated with data from our Oracle database, and then let the user enter additional information and get this data back into the database.  Also, we would like to do some fairly simple scripting like enabling/disabling form areas depending on data entered by the user.  Sometimes our clients will be connected to our network and sometimes they will not be connected.

I love all of the features that ES can do, I just don't think we're going to be able to get a J2EE application server approved and installed for our project.  This department is Microsoft.NET based and not Java.

What things can be done without involving a J2EE application server?  Can we have dynamic forms and 2-way data exchange?  Can we use Flex to create RIAs (i.e. Form Guides) from our forms that we can deploy to users?

Thank you in advance,

Dave

[Former Community Member]

You can use Forms Designer ES on your XP machines to create dynamic PDF forms that can be filled out by your users using Reader. You can hide or disable sections on these forms. You cannot save the forms containing the data unless you reader enable the form (which has cost implications) but you can add submit buttons that will send the data back to you for storage. Hope this simple explanation is of some help to you.

[Jono_Moore]

Hi Dave, you probably want to give Adobe a call to really figure out what you need.

I'm at the Queen's Printer in B.C. We're currently using Designer to build dynamic forms but haven't got into doing any server-side stuff yet.

From what you've said, it looks like you would need Reader Extensions (server product) for enabling data exchange in Reader and I think the Forms server for form guides. You can use web services for data exchange.

Hopefully somebody who knows more can chime in here as all we have at the moment is Reader Extensions and Workbench, which allows for setting up automated processes (I've not used it yet).

There are some people in the federal government using LiveCycle, as I've seen a demo of some pretty slick stuff with interchange between SAP and a couple of other environments.

[Dave_TC]

Thank you for the info. After researching some more, I see there is a new version (ES2) coming available "before the end of 2009":

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200910/AdobeUnveilsLiveCycleEnterpriseSuite2...

Also, the description of "Designer ES2" seems quite capable of doing what we need:

http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/designer/capabilities/

I will just have to wait until there is a trial download available to see if we'll require a J2EE server. I'm hoping we can just have Designer on our XP machines for creating PDF Forms (and maybe Flex form-guide applications), and our clients just need Reader 9 for entering the data and sending them back to us.

Dave