Today the workshop for SAP Netweaver Development for ABAP and JAVA from the German SAP User Group met and one of the topics was "SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe".
I am new to this whole topic, so I learned lots of new things. The most important thing for me was that the new Adobe LifeCycle Designer 8.0 will be delivered with the SAP GUI in Q1/2008. There will be lots of new objects and features which make design of interactive forms much easier. Recommendation was to use either Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0.9 or 8.1.1 for viewing the resulting PDFs. They have integrated many new standard forms which you can use for free or with minor changes like using your companies logo or hiding fields you don't need. Now you can choose from about 2000 standard forms.
To start working with the forms simply call transaction SFP or SE80 in your GUI and Adobe LifeCycle Designer should start up.
SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe need Adobe Document Services (ADS) on the application server, more exactly running on the JAVA stack. Currently ADS is running with Netweaver 7.0 SP 13 and ABAP Netweaver 7.0 SP 12 or ABAP Netweaver 2004 SP20. So Netwever SP and ABAP Stack don't have to have the same SP any longer.
Further they announced a performance improvement using bundling with Netweaver 7.0 SP 15 for use in a double-stack and since Netweaver 7.0 SP 12 for a standalone installation.
Another very important point for me was to get to know that SmartForms will run out of maintenance in the future and only Adobe Interactive Forms will be further developped. The bad news: There is no migration wizard for your existing SmartForms to SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe. If you plan to switch (and I think you have to) you have to recreate your forms in Adobe LifeCycle Designer, if there are no standard forms that you can use.
For more information about Adobe Interactive Forms you can go to http://service.sap.com/adobe. There you will find a sizing guide and an implementation guide.
Well, I'm now very keen to play with Adobe Interaactive Forms and create some forms.
