A while ago Adobe announced on their website that they would discontinue there product "Adobe Document Server". This has lead to some confusion amongst users of the SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe product. This blog attempts to clarify this confusion.
The main cause of the confusion is due to the fact that the acronym "ADS" is used for two inherently different products/components the Adobe Document Server and Adobe Document Services . Let me clarify further.
The Adobe external product "Adobe Document Server" (ADS) was first released by Adobe in March of 1999 as the first multi-function, server-based PDF generation product carrying the Adobe brand. Adobe Document Server was designed to perform a number of PDF-based operations in a server environment such as PDF distillation, page assembly, document formatting, and form data merge/extraction. The Adobe Document Server is now replaced by the Adobe LiveCycle product line which was first introduced in June of 2004. For more information on Adobe Document Server please refer to the Adobe website.
The discontinuation of the Adobe document Server has no impact on SAP Netweaver product SAP Interactive forms by Adobe, since SAP Interactive forms by Adobe uses the SAP Netweaver internal component "Adobe Document Services" (ADS) which forms the core of the SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe product. The ADS is integrated as a internal component inside of SAP Netweaver and ships with SAP Netweaver. ADS is responsible for core Adobe functionalities like PDF generation , PDF authentication etc. ADS has been using Adobe LiveCycle since its inception and therefore is and remains compliant with the same.
Hope this clarifies the confusion.
