Tuesday October 27th, 2009. So I was curious to see how my website was doing in Google search results, so I typed in “RIA Seattle” within the lonely text box of that search engine. Though my website was nowhere to be seen in any immediate results (I’ll have to work some more on my metadata and SEO), I did find an interesting link for the Adobe Roadshow. The roadshow was to be held in Seattle the very next day from when I conducted my search. RIA of course stands for Rich Internet Applications and it is a relatively new technology where companies and organizations are developing “in the cloud” to better harness the rich capabilities of the internet such as video, photos, SMS, GPS and phone for the enhancement of their websites and intranet applications.



I find this technology fascinating! For the past few months I’ve been building my own RIA’s through Adobe Flex Builder 3. Considering that the Adobe Roadshow was free to attend, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to go and see what Adobe is currently working on for their next wave of development tools for passionate web developers, such as myself. So I registered, and the next day I arrived in Fremont Seattle to the Adobe company compound, a nice mix of old town charm and modern day business. This is an area of the city I had not experienced before then.

The Adobe Roadshow was a presentation of their tools such as Adobe FlashBuilder (formerly Flex Builder), LiveCycle, and Adobe AIR. This presentation was not only a display of powerful development tools, but also a series of case studies on how high profile companies are using these tools to improve their business processes and web presence. So as I sat there to take it all in, I was amazed to learn of all the ways this Adobe suite of tools was not only making companies web sites more impressive, but also dramatically improving their company workflows to streamline former business bottleneck areas.

Here are a couple of examples where companies around the world are working with Adobe RIA tools:

• A county in Illinois has used Adobe LiveCycle ES to automate their workflow process of incorporating electronic signatures into their bundle of forms associated with court cases.

• A major financial company has used Adobe AIR for document assembly, distribution, and archiving. Also within this system there is end-to-end tracking of the documents for process improvement and compliance.

• One of largest consumer products companies has used these Adobe tools to solve their issues with SAFE (Signatures and Authentication for Everyone) digital signature standards. This allowed the company to develop a program to streamline managing, reviewing, and approving the large volume of documents associated with pertinent signatures.

• And my favorite example, and I will get more into this in another discussion, is the large built-in support Adobe Flex/Flash Builder has for the Salesforce.com CRM.

So overall it was a very impressive demonstration of impressive tools. Frankly I thought the demonstration of the capabilities of these tools was overwhelming, and that is a very good thing. Because as you take on the learning challenge of a new tool or suite of tools, you want to be sure that the sky is the limit and that your investment in time, brain space, and capital will not be soon superseded.

I think that Adobe has begun to take development to the next level.