Adobe Systems Incorporated
San Jose, California

“With competitive pressures increasing, organizations need to find new ways to deliver process efficiency and increase their business response times. The combination of document-centric processes, through LiveCycle Workflow, and business rule management via ILOG JRules, offers a powerful combination for our customers who must continuously adjust their business requirements to maintain their competitive advantage.”

Ivan Koon Senior Vice President, Intelligent Document Business Unit Adobe Systems Incorporated

Alliance relationship
Adobe and ILOG have collaborated to offer advanced business rule management for new Adobe Livecycle Workflow. Adobe LiveCycle Workflow links components of the Adobe LiveCycle platform to enable integrated, automated workflows that connect people, systems and business processes. ILOG JRules intergration for Adobe LiveCycle Workflow will provide customers with greater agility for document-centric processes. Adobe and ILOG have validated a Service Oriented Architecture-based integration framework that will be made available to their customers and systems integrator partners.

ILOG contribution
ILOG JRules provides an enterprise-class BRMS that supports multiple applications, tens of thousands of business rules and tools to support the many people involved in the rule creation and maintenance process, including business users, systems administrators and developers. For each process, business users have the option of managing their business rules in three ways: as “if/then/else” rules using drop-down menus, in decision tables or in decision tree formats.

Results
The Adobe-ILOG integration will leverage the ILOG JRules repository for providing authoring, versioning, consistency checking, auditing and traceability of rule changes. Also, the ILOG JRules engine can ensure the scalability of decision-intensive processes.

ILOG JRules adds flexibility to document-centric processes by facilitating the creation of documents dynamically—for example, for contract management— where rules dictate the composition of a contract or other legal document. ILOG JRules also adds deeper functionality for defining the policies inside processes, such as defining the individual steps to approve an insurance claim.

Technical background
The Adobe LiveCycle platform provides a secure and flexible way to use document services to extend the power of enterprise applications inside and outside the firewall. Document services enable organizations to use native XML and PDF to integrate documents into IT environments. They include Adobe Acrobat desktop software and the Adobe LiveCycle™ line of J2EE enterprise servers and design tools. Adobe LiveCycle's support of these industry standards means customers can deploy document services in today's Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs).