Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Forms is a comprehensive solution designed to streamline digital form creation and management, enabling businesses to improve user engagement and operational efficiency.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Forms | 5.2% |
| Quadient Inspire | 17.4% |
| OpenText Communications | 16.7% |
| Other | 60.7% |
AEM Forms offers robust capabilities for designing, managing, and processing digital forms. It supports responsive design for multi-device compatibility and integrates with enterprise systems to automate workflows and data capture. This improves speed and accuracy in document processes.
What are the notable features of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Forms?In industries like finance and healthcare, AEM Forms is implemented to handle large volumes of sensitive data. Banks use it to digitize account opening, while healthcare providers use it to manage patient forms securely and efficiently, demonstrating its adaptability in industry-specific scenarios.
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Forms was previously known as Adobe LiveCycle.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Managing Partner and AEM Architect at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees | 4.5 | I find AEM highly flexible and easy to set up, significantly boosting market time and empowering marketers. It scales well, and Adobe support is good. My advice is to start small and optimize hardware to avoid stability issues, which are often related to custom code or insufficient resources. |
| Owner with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | No summary available |
| Developer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | I appreciate LiveCycle's good UI and easy fillable PDF form creation. My concerns include a difficult help menu, input lag with many fields, and cumbersome tab order. It's a good product, but competition is growing. |
All these features help companies create powerful web applications that can then be customized and maintained by marketers with little involvement from IT.
My organization provides expert services to other organizations implementing AEM based solutions. Our clients usually tell us the main benefit they achieved is a faster time to market content, both in sites and other content processing like creative workflows, while also making the life of their marketing and business users easier, making them independent of their IT departments to roll out new content.
The product is in constant evolution, with several key areas being improved in each iteration. The Assets capabilities of CQ5.4 were basic and with trouble scaling, but that has changed significantly in newer versions where the Asset module has received a lot of focus and is currently one of the best solutions for Digital Asset Management out there.
Six years.
We have found occasional issues with stability but those were, in general, caused either by custom developed code or issues in the implemented architecture. When the application is installed in servers without the necessary requirements in terms of hardware specs, users may experience slow page loads and perhaps even systems not responding.
No problems with scalability. There are many ways to scale AEM instances horizontally (and of course, vertically), some of them require more configuration than others, but they all have good support.
Support from Adobe is good and responds in a timely manner. Their ticketing system works and is useful to get to the bottom of the problems. One thing to have in mind is that Adobe provides support only for the base AEM application, and not for custom code development to extend and/or customize its functionalities.
Being in a consultant company solely dedicated to Adobe CQ / AEM, this is not applicable.
Initial setup is very easy and straightforward. The application comes in the form of a JAR or WAR file for easy deployment with various tools and systems. Using the JAR you can have the application up and running in five minutes, just by double-clicking/executing the file (it requires users to have Java installed, but that is a pretty common requirement these days).
Keep solution architecture easy to avoid unnecessary license costs. Start with the basic licenses to solve your immediate needs, and only increase them if the project really requires it.
I have worked with other similar solutions that solve parts of the complete set of solutions AEM provides, but none of them has the ability to handle so many of those areas in an integral way. For web site and content management, in general, sample tools are Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress.
Start small and plan your first set of objectives clearly, leaving all the “nice-to-haves” for a later phase. Starting this way will help companies get a sample of the benefits, and get familiar with the tool in general. After the first phase, they may find things that they thought they wanted are not really required or can be achieved in a better, more efficient way in the AEM world.
Another useful suggestion is to avoid trying to recreate your current solution using AEM; rather, try to look for new and different ways to achieve the same results that take advantage of AEM’s features.
Adobe LiveCycle ES4
(www.adobe.com/products/livecycle.html)
Pros:
- Powerful users interface options; Dynamic/Static PDF, Flash, and HTML5
- Mobile Data Capture (virtually all mobile devices)
- The most scalable Intelligent e-Forms platform in the market today (good solution for front-ending your e-services)
- Great documents processing and assembly capabilities (for billing, statements, stocks reports, etc...)
- Integrated security components (digital signature, electronic signature, and rights management)
- Integrated DAM and WCM repositories
- Desktop, Web, and Mobile workspace
- Offline capabilities; PDF intelligent forms and Adobe AIR
- Wide range of integration capabilities using standard interface options (FTP, Shared Folders, Web Services, API, SMTP, etc...)
- Powerful, super fast, scalable high-end data integration and media streaming platform using Adobe LC DS (Data Services).
- Seamless integration with AEM (Adobe Web Experience Manager check it here: www.adobe.com/solutions/web-experience-management.html)
- With experience, complex implementations (customers' wishlist) could be delivered in few weeks compared to many months.
Cons:
- J2EE platform (it's plus for many and negative for many .Net customers)
- Human centric workflow designer is not for day-to-day changes...(i.e., something like ERP systems, you do not play with it every other day)
- High-end platform and requires deep and long knowledge to maximize the utilization of the platform
- Because there are many ways to do one particular business requirement, it might be a negative point for non-experienced solution provider (could drive the project delay)
- Customer need to make sure that upgrade of forms processes are maintained version by version [see below]
We have used Adobe LC in many of our projects, some times the whole suite components as solution (e.g., e-Services, Customer Engagement, Multichannel Data Capture) and sometimes only one or two components from the LC suite (e.g., BPMS, Forms, Output, or RM). We have used it to fornt-end Oracle Suite, SAP ERP, and even mainframe applications.
The overall experience was excellent, one or two upgrade projects were specially troublesome because of upgrade from 2 or 3 versions to the latest one.
You can find good point products in vertical areas such as BPMS, Forms, Output, etc... However, I could not find one technology provider provide so many features and drive innovative solutions (horizontally) as I have experienced in LC ES + AEM.
Disclaimer: My company has a business relationship with Adobe.
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****UPDATE****
Our company has been working on couple of LC ES4 upgrade projects and opportunities in the past few months...so far so good.
Especially, if you have a sized projects related to mobile-based data capture processes (virtually any device), large scale enterprise forms offline/online & inside-outside the firewalls, and/or secure documents/forms processing...
you'll get good stuff out of this platform...Enjoy :)
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LiveCycle has a good user interface and has developed an easy way to create fillable .pdf forms. Users can create a variety of field types and user input fields.
Help menu is a bit difficult to navigate. When using a lot of field, the input can lag a bit.
Assigning Tab orders, even with auto-assign, can be a bit cumbersome
Still a good product, however html vendors are creating new products each day to compete.
