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Question on the various Adobe products

Forum Index > General Acrobat Topics > Question on the various Adobe products
2009-10-05 13:51:50
mrmkitwrk
Registered: Sep 30 2009
Posts: 13

I am a real newbie to many of Adobe's products. Have been using InDesign for a while. Just bought the Adobe 9. Have made some fillable forms and done distributions, with some success, but mostly problems. Seems that access to some forms is interrupted due to a "network resource access" problem, and nobody on the "Forms" forum has been able to answer my question yet.
Now I have subscribed to the Adobe Document Center to see how it would work. And now I understand that the ADC is part of Adobe Lifecycle ES. I did understand that one could use Lifecycle to make and distribute forms, but isn't this stuff getting to be overkill? How am I to know which program to use for which application, or is it just a matter of preference?
The forms I have made in InDesign, and then converted to pdf, using Adobe 9, are for outside salespeople to access and fill out complaints from customers. Acrobat.com is in beta, so the glitches have been irritating, but it does work after a fashion. Should I be using Lifecyle, instead? What is the advantage of InDesign, Adobe 9, or Lifecycle over each other?
Put another way, I understand that Adobe Illustrator is used for highly graphical work, InDesign for less graphical, and Adobe 9 is the viewer, among other tasks. Is Lifecycle kind of one size fits all? Or does it basically take the place of a couple other applications for form work?
Thanks.

My Product Information:
LiveCycle Designer, Windows
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2009-10-07 08:04:55
#1
lkassuba
ExpertTeam
Registered: Jun 28 2007
Posts: 3636
It can definitely be very confusing trying to determine exactly what Adobe products to use for various applications. You can use InDesign, Acrobat, or LiveCycle Designer to create your forms. However, if your forms have any dynamic aspects to them, like fields that flow onto other pages when you enter text, then this can only be done in LiveCycle Designer.

Both Acrobat.com and the Adobe Document Center are online hosted services that Adobe offers that can be used with your Adobe forms. The Adobe LiveCycle ES products are separate from these hosted services that Adobe offers. The LiveCycle ES products are server-based products that companies can purchase to deploy within their organization instead of using the Adobe hosted services. For example, a company may purchase and install Adobe Rights Management ES on an internal server to secure sensitive documents within their organization. Since these are sensitive documents, they probably don't want to use an Adobe-hosted service but prefer to install something in house.

Let me know if this helps to clarify.

Lori Kassuba is an AUC Expert and Community Manager for AcrobatUsers.com.

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2009-10-07 10:05:06
#2
mrmkitwrk
Registered: Sep 30 2009
Posts: 13
Thank you. That helps a great deal. I have imported an Adobe form into LifeCycle and attempted to distribute it after that, but have had some issues with "restrictions on the form", so have more learning to do.
I went through the tutorial at Lynda.com, which helped a lot, too. It looks to me like the LifeCycle should be what I want to get used to using if I have a lot of distributed forms to work with. Perhaps doing things with that program will let my forms retain their workability better.
Thanks again.
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