Waldo Smeets .com on Rich Internet Applications

The Adobe Netherlands and Belgium presales team has started the “dr Flex & dr LiveCycle” weblog. Combined with the blog we are hosting a series of small consult-style meetings over the next few months. The idea is to be available one day per month for enterprise level questions and discussions on Adobe LiveCycle ES and Adobe Flex. So if you are an enterprise user of the Adobe software, feel free to drop by at one of these meetings. Please note that we won’t cover generic support questions, Adobe already has some good channels to address those

“During these sessions “Dr Flex & Dr LiveCycle”, observe your common Flex & LC symptoms. They advise on how to implement Adobe Enterprise Software and work in a healthy IT environment by giving you a FREE ‘health check’ session.”

The blog has a bit of a broader scope, including less enterprise specific tips and tricks about Flex and LiveCycle, but as times goes by we hope to add a nice Benelux taste to the content!

ps: We are starting the blog and the consults very low profile, but personally I have the hopes that finally these types of discussions will move into an Adobe Enterprise Developers usergroup, so let’s see where we get. I know a discussion about this topic is already ongoing at a few Adobe partners with the founders of the Adobe Flex User Group, so let’s see where things end. We definitely plan to leverage the usergroups as much as we can (some of us will be attending the first Flugr meeting later this week).

Check out www.flugr.nl (love the name!) and join the Dutch Flex User Group  aka Nederlandse Flex User Group.

This is supposed to be a true community where Dutch speaking Flex developers are sharing all relevant information with each other. I am looking forward to some real technical deep sessions coming from them, without the sales pitch I always mix in when I present

First meeting is scheduled for friday 13th (no kidding) june. I know the guys behind this initiative and they are truely talented and very passionate so I hope you will join them and share the love!

[Note: this job opening has been filled per March 1st. Welcome Klaasjan Tukker to Adobe ]

We have a new position open in the Adobe Benelux offices, namely a Business Development Manager for the Creative Pro Market. You will be joining a new-formed team of sales and creative people that spans across the Benelux. Even though the BDM role sounds extremely business focused, it actually requires that you have a fair amount of knowledge of the creative industry and have a deep understanding of what our customers are using our products for, and last but not least… you know how to use them yourself!

So if you have that unique combination of creative skills enabled by Adobe products and would like to evangelize them in a business oriented matter, then we are looking for you.

I have posted the official job description below - I haven’t seen it posted on the Adobe Jobs site yet. If you have interest, feel free to send me your résumé by email and I will forward it to the appropriate people.

ps: If you know Serge Jespers, the role we are looking for is similiar to his (obviously it’s also up to you to fullfil the role the way you envision it). Serge has been promoted and will be joining the platform evangelist team under Mike Downey and Ben Forta, being one of the leading evangelists for Europe and probably traveling across the entire world! Obviously we are looking for a new talent to fulfill his role in the Benelux, but you might realize that it’s not easy to par up with what Serge has been doing

A focused, technical, business savvy, Business Development Manager for the Creative Pro market. Based in BeLux this BDM will evaluate and manage new strategic business opportunities, initiatives, and partnerships. Oversees market analysis, monitors competitive activity, and identifies customer needs. Provides leadership in planning, designing and implementation of strategic business objectives. The successful candidate will be an experienced and polished presenter with extensive knowledge of the Multi Media landscape.

Main responsibilities

• Working with channel Sales, M&P Account Managers and Marketing on sales opportunities for the Creative Pro key product offerings with a specific emphasis on Multi Media solutions.
• Presenting at customer briefings/ tradeshows /user groups sessions/train the trainers sessions etc.
• Doing coop EU visits together with resellers and partners.
• Create vertical solution targeted business plans which align with the Adobe corporate objectives.
• Evangelize overall Creative Pro product offering within associated verticals.

Knowledge & Skills:

• Good industry knowledge in design, print and web publishing, ability to communicate with different levels of people, articulate and credibly discuss industry issues, trends and business solutions with customers/prospects would be a key asset.
• At least 5 years of progressive experience in selling software and proven track record in meeting/exceeding the sales quota strong ability to influence people and align remote teams to achieve agreed goals and objectives, establish good working relationship with channel partner & customer able to work under pressure in fast changing environment.
• Thorough understanding of the Creative Pro sector.
• Experience in evangelizing solution offerings within the Multi Media industry having been involved in sales at some level.
• Excellent presentation (demo) skills.
• Business planning enabled/motivated.
• Highly motivated individuals with good written, spoken and presentation skills.
• Language skills: Fluency in English, French and Dutch.
• Demonstrated leadership skills and excellent interpersonal skills.
• Outgoing personality and be a self-starter.
• Confidence, mature, aggressive and results-oriented.
• Degree in computer science, business or related disciplines.

We released a very interesting dutch magazine on Customer Engagement (request print here) that we created for Adobe Business Exchange - the conference for business and marketing managers regarding Customer Engagement through the internet which takes place in The Hague on October 25th.

The magazine has the subtitle “The challange of customer engagement - stay ahead of the game” and features case studies and background articles on how customers have been using Adobe technology to improve customer (and employee) engagement:

• Philips talks about how and why they used Flex and AIR on top of SAP
• Robeco explains why offering proper product information is a Unique Selling Point and how Flex helps here
• DutchView talks more about video experiences and how they teamed with Adobe to deliver a scalable end-to-end solution for the Dutch market to use
• AXA tells how they used PDF and Adobe LiveCycle to streamline business processes
• Belgacom has a case study on how they used Flex to deliver their Rich Internet TV experience
• Adobe’s own Jeff Whatcott explains the Adobe Engagement Platform
• SAP explains why it partnered with Adobe to deliver better frontends to their business applications
• And more business information articles on Web 2.0 within enterprises, document archiving, and customer self service

Adobe is more and more moving into these business oriented events. The setting is obviously different than the designer and developer conferences: more ROI talks, many case studies, well known managers explaining their vision and last but not least…. more suits! To highlight some of this years visionary presenters:

• Forrester Research - How to build loyalty with every interaction?
• ABN AMRO, Peter Wonder, executive vice president - on digital document workflows
• Philips, Gilles Domartini, VP & General Manager Online Sales and Marketing - on Philips’ online business transformatie strategy
• SAP - on Business Network Transformation
• Adobe, Jeff Whatcott, Executive Vice President - on The Challenge of Customer Engagement

In the afternoon there will by more presentations by Robeco, Johan Enschede Amsterdam, DutchView, Philips Lighthing and many more. You can read more and register through www.adobe-business-exchange.com/nl/ or through this PDF.

Rich Internet Applications are entering the enterprise and get deployed behind the firewall. Philips - one of the worlds leading technology companies - has recently rolled out a Flex and AIR based application on top of SAP (the AIR app was developed by the guys at Apollogic).

The application is used by Key Account Managers and is a new user interface on top of SAP CRM, making those managers more productive when maintaining pricelists for their customers. The application is deployed online - integrated in the SAP pages, as well as off-line as an AIR application. The results are fantastic, because of this new interface account managers have become more productive and increased the frequency with which they maintain customer specific information, which is better for Philips and better for the customers.

Because of AIR they can now also easily access the data, which is normally stuck behind the firewall, in a safe and managed way whilst they are on the road. They can make price change proposals offline, and the AIR application routes everything back to SAP as soon as it gets connected.

This is a true SOA application that combines the best of Flex and AIR with the best of SAP. Rich DataGrids make the data more accessible, Batch Updates (leveraging SAP webservices) keep account managers more productive and Charts help them to better analyze the data. Last but not least they do Enterprise Mashups by pulling data from different backend systems into a single frontend.

Because if the Sence and Simplicity of the application I can not (yet) show you a recording of it, but we have published a case study (sorry, Dutch only right now) in which we interview the manager that came up with this idea. I’m sharing the document below, using Adobe’s new Document Sharing Service (the YouTube for documents?):

Adobe MAX Europe is less than a month away, and we already have more than 100 registrations of designers and developers from Belgium and Netherlands. Whilst MAX is a great event to network across Europe and to meet experts from Adobe, it apparently also is a great opportunity to meet your local colleagues! So if you are from The Netherlands or Belgium and have not registered yet, you have no excuse to go to your boss and get his approval…. you are not the only one going and maybe your competition is, so you should

Given that Benelux is only a small region in Europe, MAX promises to be a gigantic European web developer event!

Last week Philips launched a new product selector on their Consumer Electronics website. I was involved in this project so my opinion is biased, but hopefully you agree that the result is a very nice Rich Internet Application. You can experience the application by going to www.consumer.philips.com and then drill down to a specific product category (e.g. TVs).

Guiding users from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0
Obviously the selector has been inspired by famous applications like the Vodafone Handy Finder and Flex Store. However, whilst those RIAs have a more ‘flashy’ look and feel over them, Philips clearly has chosen for an experience that is more of a blend of Flash and HTML experiences.

Only time will tell what works out best for the end-user, but I think it’s a very nice example of how a large company can “guide” it’s site visitors from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 without disrupting too much of the ‘old’ experience. I speak to a lot of companies with big, frequently used websites, and somehow they always are afraid that RIA will be so much of a new experience that it becomes disruptive in a negative way. That is incorrect and I keep saying it over and over again; the transaction can be done very fluently and you should never forget to make Experience Designers and user research part of this process, they are there to avoid you making those mistakes. I am happy that Philips, a well recognized international brand, is showing off how you can do it.

Some technical details
The application has got many things that a good RIA should have, including a few which some people think are not possible to achieve within Flex (and which Philips also wasn’t sure of when they contacted my for more information when comparing Flex with AJAX);

• Single engine supporting many products, product categories, many languages and many filtering parameters.
• It supports proper browser interactions like bookmarking specific products and usage of the back button, still many people think this is not possible in RIA. Also notice how browser pages nicely resize when more of less content becomes available.
• The application seems to perform very well on my machine, despite the amount of data that is loaded.
• All product information, filtering settings and language information is pulled from an ecommerce CMS and loaded into the front-end on the fly. So Philips can easily add not only products, but also details, filtering settings, languages and even product categories using their CMS without having to change the Flex application itself.
• If the user doesn’t have Flash Player 9 installed, the CMS system will notice this and automatically fall back to the original HTML design for the website. So no need for Philips to be afraid of ‘only’ 90% Flash Player 9 penetration.

So obviously there will be AJAX supporters stating that this could have been build in AJAX as well, and probably it could. Whilst I can not speak for Philips and their exact reasons, I think they clearly have a long term vision on ‘Sense and Simplicity’ and apparently they felt confident that they could deliver that experience with Flex.

Not there yet
The application is useful and given the time constraints that Philips had to launch it (I can not disclose the exact details, but this was delivered in a record time), I really think they have created a solid foundation for further RIA expansion. There’s still still some things on my wish list though, like improved printing, drag and drop functionality (I am getting so much used to drag and drop on the web these days, is it just me?) and the ability to get a PDF with the comparisons so that I can my selections to my girlfriend for approval

I will be attending Adobe MAX Europe, which takes place in beautiful Barcelona, and will also present a session on Flex Builder 3. MAX Europe looks like one of the best conferences we’ve had in Europe since ages, I am really looking forward to learning a lot from all the European experts and the Adobe employees…. yes, even for me as Adobe employee MAX is a great opportunity to learn from colleagues.

I know that there will be a big crowd of designers and developers from The Netherlands and Belgium, so if you haven’t decided on joining yet….. make sure you do and join our party

My colleague Andrew Shorten has been posting some discount codes (ECM297), so be quick and get your discount before the end of this week.

We’ll be sneak-peaking the upcoming releases of Adobe Create Suite 3 and Adobe Apollo - exclusively to the award nominees - next week during the SpinAwards Day.

Obviously this is ‘top secret’, but if you are attending the day-program and are one of the nominees to present it’s work to the jury, you’ll get the opportunity to learn about some of the stuff that Adobe has got in it’s labs (no no, we won’t show you all!).

This way we hope to show you how you can secure your chances to become a nominee again next year