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LCCS shuts down permanently December 31st. What's your plan?

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Level 2

I assume everyone received the email (below) from Jeff Stanier this morning regarding LCCS being shut down for good at the end of the year. My question is what everyone is doing in the face of this news?

We've built a large part of our company on LCCS and are scrambling for a solution that we can implement to replace LCCS before the end of the year. There was no transition plan or any details at all given in the email.

Any other LCCS users discussing transition plans? Is there any opportunity for us to collaborate so that those of us dependent on LCCS aren't totally left in the cold?

Much appreciated,

Ion

      


  Dear LCCS Customer,
 
I am writing to inform you of Adobe‚s plan with respect to LiveCycle Collaboration Services (LCCS).  Due to recent changes in Adobe‚s strategic direction the decision has been made to end of life the LCCS product. Adobe will continue to provide LCCS production service for an additional 9 months until December 31, 2012.  At that time the service will be shut down.  Beginning March 23, 2012 the following changes will be made to the service:
  • In order to support your continued patronage while we ramp down the service, Pay Per Usage (PPU) accounts will no longer be charged and a free account quota of $1000/month will be granted. As a result of this change, monthly billing statements will no longer be issued.
  • Free subscribers will no longer be able to upgrade to a PPU account.
  • No new accounts will be created.
  We apologize for any inconvenience the termination of the service causes you. Thank you for being an Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Services customer.

Jeff Stanier
Group Product Manager
Adobe LiveCycle
18 Replies

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Level 1

We're in the same predicament.  I've started looking into Red5.  I looked at Vidyo, but I think they're going to be too expensive.  It doesn't look like there are any viable alternatives at this stage.  Sure wish they would keep the service going.  Has anyone else looked into Red5 or Wowza?

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Level 4

Hi noiboy/Mario

Thanks for posting this.  I just started a similar thread (http://forums.adobe.com/message/4277140#4277140) with a couple of ideas.

Jeff

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Level 2

Just wanted to ad my name to the list of those looking for a replacement

Glenn

tinylion

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Level 4

Wowza seemes to work pretty well out of the box.

Red5 is nice but doesn't support RTMFP only RTMP.

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Level 3

Yesterday's announcement wasn't exactly a surprise given the messaging that has been coming from Adobe recently, but what IS very surprising is that there was no contingency plan for business's that have been built on LCCS as part of the announcement.

Surely Adobe has plans to either:

a) Open Source LCCS, so that business's that have been created and invested in based on the availability of LCCS can host their own instances of the product

or

b) Give us some idea as to what the plans are for the code. Does Adobe have any offers for the LCCS business in the pipeline or are they interested in receiving offers?

Yes, I'm sure it is buried deep in the fine print of the service agreement that LCCS could be taken down with little or no notice, but it was positioned as a product that people could build businesses on. Simply hitting CTRL-A/Delete on the entire code base makes no sense for anyone, including Adobe.

I know there are alternative technologies out there, but a lot of people who built business on LCCS would at least like to have some option to continue using the product after the end of this year.

- Barry

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Level 2

I agree wholeheartedly. LCCS being shelved doesn't come as a huge surprised, but we built our business on top of LCCS and now they're pulling the rug out from underneath us. We essentially have 9 months to rebuild LCCS on our own. Adobe has much bigger problems right now, so I don't LCCS is likely to get addressed. It's pretty clear they are not going to open source it based on Jeff Stanier's comment in the other thread:

"Open Source.  We have looked at this as an option and it's simply not viable for a number of reasons.   There are dependancies on third party and Adobe code that are extremely difficult to separate out.   Some of this code runs other services at Adobe that will continue to operate."

It's upsetting, but rather then being angry, we're doing our best to form a contingency plan. Looks like a number of us are in the same boat, so all comments and collaboration are welcome.


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Level 3

If open sourcing isn't an option it doesn't seem like it would take a lot for Adobe to find a partner willing to provide hosting services for the product. It sounds like they don't care.

We can rebuild all the parts of LCCS that we use without too much difficulty, but we invested a lot of time in getting the solution with LCCS tested of ready for production. Any complex application built on LCCS is going to require a lot of testing once it is rebuilt on other technology. When Adobe released LCCS they knew that this is not the sort of service that you should simply pull the plug on.

Companies may very well go out of business because of this decision. It's a pretty shameful act.

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Level 2

According to the latest from the Flex Summit three months ago, LCCS will be migrated to the Apache Spoon Project.

http://www.spoon.as/2011/flex-summit-live-updates-day-2/


"Adobe will do the following…

Open source contribution of related technologies:

blazeds.net, server-side AS, LCDS, LCCS, TLF, Gravity, FXG, OSMF"

Let us hope that Adobe stick to this promise.

Of course, it would have great if Adobe had included that information in the recent email annoucement so people would not be losing their minds right now wondering what the hell to replace it with. More completely inept communication from Adobe, but that seems to be par for the course now.

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Level 4

it indeed sounds like they just don't care.  it is unspeakably irresponsible to pull the plug like this.

jeff, i know you're only the messenger here, so no hostility toward you at all.  but can you please speak to the possibility of migrating LCCS to a partner who would be willing to maintain the service?

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Level 4

Hi Adam,

It's not a matter of Adobe not caring.  I have not been able to locate a partner that would be willing to take on LCCS as a business.  Remember it has to be viable and profitable for anyone to make a business out of it.  Part of the infrastructure that LCCS uses is part of the Adobe instrastructure for other product offerings -- particularly the user provisioning and billing.   The partner would need to rebuild that in order to support a community of developers.   If someone on this forum wants to have business discussion about taking this over we can talk under NDA.

Jeff (stanier@adobe.com)

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Level 2

Jeff,

Again, I realize you're just the messenger, so I bear no animosity towards you, but this decision by Adobe and the way it's being handled (again) makes absolutely no sense to me.

If the user provisioning and billing is the only major aspect which is holding up releasing this technology to Spoon (if indeed that is the case), then why do we have to assume that the "partner" taking over this tech has to make any money off it? Why could a company not use this to install on their own servers, much like FMS? Why assume that a hosting provider has to be involved? The tech could be released to Spoon with the understanding that certain aspects, previously tied into Adobe billing backend, will only work once the community rearchitects them to work with an open source version. LCCS as it's given over to the community would be "broken," as it were, but only for as long as it takes for the community to redesign those missing aspects, assuming they are merely administrative backend aspects and not a part of the core technology.

And if some of the aspects of the tech are the same as what are in other current Adobe offereings, why does LCCS have to come in a complete package? Would it not be possible to "license" the NDA aspects of the tech to Spoon or another "angel partner" (for free, since you're letting it go anyways), and liberate the rest of LCCS to spoon?

C'mon Adobe (and I don't mean you Jeff), you can't have it both ways: you all but admitted that after all this time you still have not figured out how to monetize your own technologies, so you're gradually giving them away. Well, then give them away already, and stop holding the rest of us  hostage. Please.

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Level 4

thanks for the reply jeff, part of the perception of 'caring' involves the disclosure of details like you've just done.  receiving an email that only says "we're shutting down, sorry for the inconvenience" and doesn't provide alternatives creates a perception of not caring.

how massive an undertaking is it to rewrite provisioning and billing for LCCS? i realize you can't talk details without an NDA, but there are likely a few developers who are relying on LCCS that would be willing to contribute to this effort. in theory they could work in tandem with a partner like Influxis to migrate the service. 

i would be willing to sign an NDA in order to assess the development effort required to rebuild LCCS away from its adobe couplings.  is that possible?

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Level 1

Please keep LCCS alive!

The most innovative product is going to be shut down?

Implemented lot of customer ideas with it, and just going into financial discusses about venture capital for a finished concept and PoC.

Please keep LCCS alive or do something. But DO it.

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Former Community Member

Jeff,

I understand why Adobe would want to move away from Flash based services, and I appreciate you trying to help find a solution for us.  That being said, I have spent the past year developing an application using LCCS and building a site to support it.  I and my partner were doing final testing and were going to go live within the next couple of months.  We already have a few customers lined up and have invested a lot of time and money into this.  Needless to say, the recent announcement feels like a girlfriend you really like dumping you with very few signs that the relationship was having trouble.  Do you think I'm happy Jeff?

After reading the posts in this forum, it's obvious that there are many people (and many more who are reading, but not posting) who love LCCS and aren't too happy with what's going on.  Many of them are making money and have a lot at stake with LCCS.  I would seriously think about what solutions you can offer us.  Suggesting that we go through a hosted FMS plan and build everything from scratch is an insult and simply unacceptable!  We need a better solution!

Matt

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Level 4

Hi all,

Apologies for the Friday night post and delayed reply -- I've been on the road this week.   Please see my latest posting in the LCCS alternatives thread.

Jeff

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Level 4

Hi Adam+k

Do you want to shoot me an email and we can talk next week?

jeff

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Level 4

hey jeff, email sent.

one thought regarding the user provisioning - i do external authentication for my app that uses LCCS and it was relatively easy to implement, so given that the user provisioning on the backend of LCCS is too tightly coupled to adobe's user model and re-implementing that is too great a task, perhaps an option could be to do away with provisioning altogether and leave it up to the developer to provide their own external authentication?

just a thought, and something we can discuss further next week.

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Former Community Member

Jeff,

While there are alternatives to chatting and web cams and all of that, there is one feature I do not see anyone but Adobe being able to implement (as it is done in LCCS) and that is screen sharing.  Are there any plans to allow this feature to be opened?  I have invested a lot of time in this feature.