Adobe ColdFusion 10 Enterprise / Use cases

Need
To create a responsive and efficient live chat system so that website visitors have a pleasant experience with no delays in responses

Challenge
Chat experiences are generally good when site traffic is low. However, in times of heavy load, such as heightened demand or during a crisis, user experiences tend to degrade considerably, making the company seem unresponsive and incompetent. In the case of paid-for support, it could mean loss of business opportunity for monetization. It is difficult to build a chat system with polling, because it involves writing and managing a significant amount of code using traditional HTTP requests to build for consistent performance under a heavy load. It also requires substantial tweaking or hacking to prevent an adverse chat experience caused by network latency.

The Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 provides easy-to-use messaging APIs on top of websockets to facilitate building an efficient chat system with little effort and quickly by writing fewer lines of code. ColdFusion websockets also help reduce network latency manifold thereby significantly improving the chat experience even under heavy load.

Features
HTML5 websockets

Ideal for
Large online portals that need to offer customers prompt pre-sales and after-sales support, speedy resolution of queries and convenient access to expert or emergency services, such as healthcare, insurance companies, online retail, and education.

Need
To let developers access and use multiple versions of web services that are consumed by a number of applications

Challenge
Web services keep changing per business needs, but the client applications that consume these services might not necessarily want to or be able to change in sync. It is imperative to let multiple versions of web services co-exist. In the absence of effective version management of web services updates, keeping applications updated in sync with the web services they use is extremely difficult. And because older versions of the web service might no longer be supported, applications that use them are likely to fail.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 supports REST and SOAP-based web services that help client applications invoke the required version of a chosen web service by just passing few parameters as a query or header. You can expose server-side components as a web service by adding a few attributes or keywords.

Features
REST and SOAP–based web services

Ideal for
Organizations operating in a distributed computing environment with disparate systems, especially those that need to customize their site for a variety of audiences, maintain different user interfaces for audiences accessing via different devices, or localize their site for multiple geographies.

Need
To display a consistent online video experience across browsers and devices

Challenge
Today, it is imperative for organizations to provide videos on their portals as well as on sites like YouTube and Vimeo. However, consistency—or the lack of it—impacts the corporate image. Given the proliferation of devices, browsers, and media players however, delivering such a uniform experience is both tedious and time consuming.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 offers built-in support for an HTML5 video player and a video control based on Adobe Flash® Player, with bi-directional fallback to provide a consistent look and feel across multiple browsers and devices.

Features
CFMEDIAPLAYER

Ideal for
Organizations that want to make information more impactful and experiential by offering videos such as training webinars, product sales and support demos, or client and employee testimonials. For example, Information Technology (IT), Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), e-commerce, knowledge base vendors.

Need
To create enterprise management dashboards that offer myriad interactive representations of data, reflect data changes in real time, and allow modifications to be made in the backend or underlying database

Challenge
Most dashboards available today are static, need to be refreshed frequently, and cannot be used as control centers. Interactive and dynamic dashboards are difficult to build because they require constant polling of the server and use up a lot of bandwidth. It takes significant development effort to represent data meaningfully. Solutions are complex to build and delivering scalability is not easy.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 provides built-in support for HTML5 websockets making it simple to build dashboards that are updated in real-time and run significantly faster than those created using traditional polling. Interactive HTML5 charting allows end-users to quickly switch between data representations. Out-of-the-box message-handling and server communication helps you deliver this power and sophistication using fewer lines of code.

Features
HTML5 websockets, HTML5 charting

Ideal for
Users who need to make frequent decisions based on large-scale data analysis. For example, executives, department heads, and sales and marketing teams.

Need
To create interactive collaboration platforms where participants can conduct live meetings across geographies

Challenge
Given the global nature of business today, it is vital for organizations to have tools that let their stakeholders engage with each other virtually as they would in the real world. Creating a whiteboard is extremely difficult with the conventional method of long polling. Allowing real-time updates and inputs such as handwriting and graphical annotations poses serious challenges, and delivering performance and scalability is considerably difficult.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 provides built-in support for HTML5 websockets making it simple to build whiteboards that are updated in real-time, facilitate efficient broadcast of graphic information and run significantly faster than those created using traditional polling. This offers more control in an online collaboration session through authentication, rights management and publishing of data in various views or formats for different clients. Out-of-the-box message-handling and server communication helps deliver this power and sophistication using fewer lines of code.

Features
HTML5 websockets

Ideal for
Global organizations with geographically distributed resources, including vendors, customers, employees and experts, who need to interact to share ideas, conduct training and reviews, offer feedback, and work collaboratively. For example, Information Technology (IT), Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), automobile, telecommunication, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI).

Need
To offer customers the same web applications, as well as the same user experience, on their mobile devices as they get on their desktops or notebooks

Challenge
As consumers become increasingly more mobile, it is critical for companies to deliver fully loaded web applications on smartphones and tablets so that the brand experience remains rich and consistent. In the absence of an easy way to interact with the services exposed on the server, it is time consuming and tedious to build dynamic applications with live updates and instant notifications. Performance imperatives in the face of bandwidth limitations and the overhead imposed by HTTP requests mean that mobile applications often end up becoming stripped down versions of desktop applications.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 provides built-in support for REST and HTML5 websockets and charting, making it easier to develop mobile applications that dynamically reflect changes to data in a rich and interactive way without increasing the overhead. Using minimal code changes, you can expose server-side components that contain business logic as a REST-based service.

Features
REST, HTML5 websockets, HTML5 charting

Ideal for
Organizations that need to let employees use their mobile devices for official work, and those who are facing increased customer traffic via mobile devices, such as gaming, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), entertainment, hospitality, telecommunication, social media, or e-commerce

Need
To build and maintain robust online stores that offer a comprehensive range of products and services and handle peak traffic without delays

Challenge
Because online stores offer a much larger range of goods compared to their physical counterparts, it is important that these be displayed for easy discoverability and that performance remains good even in times of peak traffic. It is time consuming and error prone to provide scaling through clustering of servers, which requires caching data. A lot of time and effort—including identifying, testing and working with Ajax libraries—is possibly wasted building an interface that delivers a positive, personalized user experience and contextual recognition of the user’s visit.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 provides a built-in solution to easily maintain server performance in a clustered environment by offering distributed caching powered by EHCACHE. A wide variety of customizable user interface components including the grid, accordion, tabbed layout, trees, menus and many more, help you quickly build applications with minimal coding.

Features
UI components, caching, REST, enterprise infrastructure

Ideal for
Organizations in the retail and e-commerce space across lifestyle, fashion, electronic, telecommunication, and consumer durable brands.

Need
To make the paperless office a reality by providing internal and external users a more secured environment for document storage and retrieval, and efficient workflows for information access, transaction and generation of PDF documents programmatically

Challenge
In the absence of an integrated solution for automating the flow of paper from generation, storage and retrieval, to reporting, users need to learn multiple applications, resulting in wastage of time and duplication of effort. A workflow with PDF at the core is an obvious solution, but generating and manipulating PDF documents on the fly is a complex task dependant on external libraries that need to be thoroughly tested and verified for performance, scale, and reliability.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 provides the built-in functionality to create PDF documents dynamically and manipulate them by merging multiple PDFs, adding watermarks, and creating thumbnails. Extraction of data from PDF forms and pre-population of forms help facilitate processing with minimal coding. Encryption and password protection help keep information more secure.

Features
CFDocument, CFPDF, CFPDFForm

Ideal for
Organizations that process a lot of forms or are mandated to maintain records for a long period. For example, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), government departments, insurance, education, defense, travel, healthcare.

Need
To create dynamic documents enabling frequent updates, real-time processing, more secured distribution and easy searching

Challenge
As organizations increasingly generate and share information electronically, automate workflows and carry out bulk processing of documents, they need a server-side solution to keep their files more secure, dynamically updated, and synchronized with the back-end database. The more complex that spreadsheets become, the more time-consuming it is to analyze and process the data contained in them. Integrating information across multiple products from multiple vendors is challenging and often results in poor performance or a sub-optimal user experience.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 provides a comprehensive, out-of-the-box solution to convert office documents to PDF, with easy-to-use tags and spreadsheet functions that make it easy to create, manipulate, extract, search, and query spreadsheets.

Features
Working with PDF documents: CFDocument, CFSpreadsheet, CFPresentation, Microsoft Office file interoperability

Ideal for
All organizations that work with large databases and need to do significant volumes of form processing.

Need
To manage the supply-chain workflow efficiently, addressing scalability issues, accurate forecasting, and timely delivery

Challenge
Providing a consolidated update to all stakeholders is difficult, made more so by the lack of standardization across systems and platforms within organizations and across suppliers. Integration of data coming from various backends and opening up systems through well-defined interfaces is complex and fraught with security risks.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 provides built-in capabilities for interacting with Java™, .NET, portlets, SharePoint, and Microsoft Exchange to act as the enterprise “glue” connecting different environments. For other environments ColdFusion makes it easy to consume web services exposed by other systems, and it provides one of the easiest ways to publish web services to allow other systems to talk to ColdFusion applications. A sophisticated built-in scheduler helps automate process flows by managing trigger notifications as well as trigger responses.

Features
Java integration, .NET integration, web services support, Microsoft Exchange integration, Microsoft SharePoint integration, portlets, REST, event gateway, scheduler

Ideal for
Large organizations working with multiple suppliers across geographies seeking to streamline their supply chain without adversely impacting services to customers. For example, automobile, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), online retail, furniture companies, electronics, consumer Durables.

Need
To help protect websites against various forms of security threats that can result in the disclosure of confidential user information, compromise protected company data, or disrupt service

Challenge
Businesses usually come to know about the kind of attacks possible on their websites only after the damage is done. The nature of security threats keeps changing, and it is very difficult to predict them all and to safeguard against those that might happen in future. Protecting against breaches at the application layer is nearly impossible when the platform itself has holes.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 is Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS)-compliant, provides easy-to-use APIs for strong encryption, includes Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) support for network protocols, and has built-in functions to help prevent against cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, session hijacking, clickjacking, and denial-of-service attacks. Selecting the secure profile option during installation helps maintain high security by default for all server settings.

Features
Security enhancements, Hotfix installer

Ideal for
Organizations with high-profile, public-facing websites, as well as those offering online transactional capabilities, such as government, defense, pharmaceutical, e-commerce, and banks.

Need
To treat the website as a core customer touchpoint and not merely a peripheral activity—to build dynamic, fully-featured, interactive websites that give customers as fulfilling an experience as other organizational touchpoints

Challenge
Building engaging content for web applications is challenging and expensive because the solutions available today are not comprehensive and operate in silos. In the absence of an integrated solution, considerable developer effort is wasted in trying to understand these siloed systems and make them work in sync.

Solution
Adobe® ColdFusion® 10 provides an integrated platform to create rich web applications with support for a built-in video player, image manipulation functionality, processing and manipulation of PDF documents, and interactive charts and maps. Native support for multiple platforms and browsers allows for fall-back for features that might not be supported natively on a particular browser.

Features
Websockets, web services, charting, media player, images, map, PDF

Ideal for
Organizations in various industries but particularly those that need to drive community conversations and encourage user-generated content by providing maps, images, videos, audio, PDF brochures, real-time graphs, reviews, blog discussions, user forums, and feeds from social networks, as well as letting users engage with company-provided content.