Intelligent Enterprise

Did you know Adobe had a business process management suite (BPMS)? Most people don't, even though with more than 5,000 customers they could be considered a major player. One reason people don't know about Adobe and BPM is that the company doesn't talk about it in the usual way. In fact, it treats the normal catalog of BPMS features and functions, like workflow and integration adapters, as commodities. For example, Adobe includes process modeling and a workflow engine inside every copy of LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, although to get full human task support you need to get the Process Management ES component as well.

Instead, Adobe's positioning emphasizes user "engagement," which is Adobe's code for an effective user interface, since ordinary HTML user interfaces, such as found in most customer-facing Web applications and human workflow tasks, cannot — in Adobe's view — fully meet user needs. Thus while most BPMS vendors make orchestration the centerpiece and UI an afterthought, Adobe takes the reverse approach.

The ace up their sleeve is that the players for Adobe's rich Internet application formats — PDF and Flash — are already ubiquitous. Do you know of any desktop that doesn't have them installed? You might say, so what? Lots of products support PDF and Flash. And Adobe would answer, not the way LiveCycle does. LiveCycle provides a wealth of special server-controlled features that lets you use the free Adobe Reader to fill out forms, digitally sign forms and documents, apply security and digital rights management, encode user data into scannable barcodes, and all kinds of other crazy things. And Adobe's tools let you render XML process data in Ajax web formats (Flex), multimedia Flash, or PDF, and pop back and forth between the formats. While most BPMS vendors are preaching agility and ease of use to Java developers, Adobe is going after the larger population of Flex and Flash web developers and introducing them to BPM.

OK, that part of the story is about a year old, not new. What's new from Adobe, in the unglamorously named "Update 1" version of LiveCycle Enterprise Services, is content management. This is an OEM version of Alfresco's open source ECM offering, tightly integrated with the LiveCycle development environment. Besides the basics of foldering and search, versioning and access control, it provides automatic content classification, retention management, and team collaboration. Integrated with LiveCycle's BPM, it provides built-in support for content events, where a new or updated document in the repository can trigger a new process or complete a waiting process activity, based on automated policies and rules.

Previously, to get this kind of "active content" behavior, you had to go to EMC Documentum or IBM FileNet… at a considerably higher pricetag. And if you already have Documentum or FileNet, Adobe also has a LiveCycle BPM adapter for those, too. Real ones, documented and supported, not something a PSG guy hacked together one weekend for a customer. So I think Update 1 could make Adobe a player in the content-enabled BPM category.

Adobe tends to lump content management in the "engagement" bag, but I suspect it's a different market, and at least as big. Any human-centric process has document attachments, and in most BPMSs they are completely unmanaged. They are stored in a filesystem with no metadata other than the process instance, no access control, search, or — most important — retention management. The lifecycle of these attachments is often independent of the process instance, and stretches over a longer period. The ECM world has been successful over the past few years raising awareness of compliance and retention issues, and I have no doubt a similar thing could happen in BPM, but most users don't want to spend a lot of money on it. Now with LiveCycle ES, they won't have to.