Tech-Pro’s LiveCycle Migration Services

Starting with the advent of LiveCycle ES2, migrating from LiveCycle ES to ES4 has been challenging for many developers who want to take advantage of the new ES4 application development model.  In addition to some deprecated services that can be manually adjusted, the real development effort has been in restructuring applications to take advantage of the ES4 model especially when large applications are involved.  Although there is a migration tool from Adobe to convert LiveCycle  ES applications to LiveCycle  ES4 applications on an as-is basis, Tech-Pro offers another migration path and a tool for developers who desire to more readily restructure single applications to the newer “multi-structured” application model in ES4.  Tech-Pro tools can also help you restructure your existing ESx application(s) with minimal effort.

• The Problem
  Migrating manually can get tricky and complex when you want to break-up the existing LiveCycle  ES processes into multiple LiveCycle ES4 applications in order to take advantage of the LiveCycle  ES4 development model.  Nested processes will lose their internal references when they are moved to a different application.  This requires that all processes containing nested processes will need to be manually adjusted by opening each affected process, deleting the referenced nested process, re-inserting the new nested process and connecting the variables to each other.  This is very time-consuming and subject to errors especially for large ES applications.

• Tech-Pro’s Solution
  Using Tech-Pro’s migration path and tools, every process file is carefully parsed and all references are adjusted programmatically from a pre-defined mapping that you set-up in advance.  The tool creates multiple applications depending on your needs, moves the adjusted process files, renames the processes if specified, and moves forms, schemas and other assets as defined.  The following diagram explains the concept:

Tech-Pro’s migration process and revised application structure has many advantages including:

1. Tech-Pro’s migration tools save you time and money while preventing your application from breaking during the migration process particularly for large applications.

2. Forms and processes are put in different applications, so the project is more logical and administrable.  Subsequently, multiple developers of different roles (i.e., forms developers and process developers) can work more effectively on the project in parallel.

3.  Some resources (e.g., fragments and schemas) are categorized together so they can be better reused.

4. The structure reduces the impact scope when developers do some operations like deploying and un-deploying applications.

5. Generally, the more applications being used by the development team, the less team members will affect each other which promotes parallel development.

6. The structure leads to better performance.  It takes a lot more time to do operations like synchronize one application with a large number of assets.

7.  LiveCycle ES4 has integration with AEM / CQ using OTB Adobe’s LiveCycle Connector which simplifies using LiveCycle APIs within the AEM / CQ OSGi environment.

8.  Applications are more compact which prevents performance sluggishness.  For LiveCycle  ES4, it’s recommended that the count of assets in a single application should be less than 50 items as a general rule.