Adobe targets governments with LiveCycle

Adobe Systems is trying to strengthen its hold on federal, state and local markets with a new version of LiveCycle, the company's workflow management software.

Steve Rotter, senior product marketing manager at Adobe, said the company has been aggressively pursuing the enterprise market for about three years.

The company is perhaps best known for its Acrobat Distiller and Reader products, which create and display PDF files. Its graphics design software, such as Photoshop and PageMaker, are widely used. Rotter said the company also makes software to help organizations function better, and LiveCycle is an example.

Agencies and other organizations are trying to automate workflow processes, which often include hundreds of individual processes.

"What we're seeing is a great need for taking that to the next level," Rotter said. "That need has been around probably for a long time, but there hasn't been a cost-effective way to do that."

In Kane County, Ill., Circuit Court Clerk Deborah Seyller has been leading a project to convert court processes to paperless ones using LiveCycle. The first project she undertook was to automate the processing of petitions for protective orders. People who need such orders can now fill out the forms online. The system routes the forms through a validation process and then to a judge, who electronically approves or rejects them.

Seyller plans to tackle the processes for issuing warrants next.

The county began using LiveCycle because Adobe bought an earlier forms-building software application that the county had been using and then began offering new products, she said.

"When they offered [LiveCycle], it was like the answer to our prayers," Seyller said. "We had been looking since 1997. Not even the hardware was in place. Nobody had laptops that would do forms. Now they have tablet PCs. Everything's falling into place."