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Applications are becoming more demanding from a user experience perspective. There are so many examples now of revolutionary user experience patterns that it is hard for users not to wish for, or perhaps even demand, the same from their enterprise applications. After all, productivity is of utmost importance in the enterprise and as users are exposed to new ways of being more productive it is only natural for them to see how these tools could be useful in other applications.
How has the evolution of Adobe Flex impacted enterprise applications?
Enterprise applications have a challenge before them. How do you keep up? Traditional web-based solutions are predominantly built on HTML, Javascript and some backend technology. They tend to be very linear in how they pattern solutions. Step 1 or Page 1 followed by Step 2 or Page 2 and so on. The advent of AJAX fostered new options to allow these applications to become non-linear to some extent but in truth, most implementations of this are kept relatively simple. A good example of this is Facebook. There, a lot of simple tasks can be done without leaving a given page, but anything complex is driven from a more traditional user experience. Truth is, more complex interactivity is possible with these traditional technologies but it requires significant expertise, significant complexity and, ultimately, significant money.
A few years ago, Adobe took the Flash Platform and wrapped up a software development kit around it and called it Flex. The biggest impact from this is that it took what was an already proven and visually rich platform in Flash, and made it approachable to countless numbers of engineers. What resulted was a broadly available capability for building rich, dynamic and visually compelling applications delivered over the web. User experience problems that seemed far from solvable with traditional web technology are becoming a significantly less daunting task. If you want to see to great examples of this, check out Sliderocket.com and Gliffy.com.
While there are other options available to construct what has become know as Rich Internet Applications or RIA, Adobe, it would seem, is ahead of the curve at this point. Microsoft has also stepped into the mix with its Silverlight technology and Java is also moving in as well. Regardless of the platform, the technological revolution in Web-delivered applications cannot be ignored. Enterprise applications, where adoption and productivity are so important, can harness a great deal of power from this technology and should be open to solutions that utilize its capabilities and distinct user experience advantages.
And, to give you a little peak at a product we’ve been working on, Adobe evangelist James Ward has a sneak preview here.
Tags: Adobe, enterprise, sales analytics