Acrobat 8 or LiveCycle?

I was browsing through messages of the Adobe Community Expert program forum and saw that a question was raised about what is appropriate for their scenario. To assess this, answer the following questions:

On the existing paper based documents:
- How many of these form processing occur on a daily basis, weekly, and/or monthly? This will dictate whether a server based solution is appropriate, or an Acrobat solution.
- What portion of the process does your client wish to automate? (in our scenarios, they tend want to automate as much as possible to save time, reduce error rate, reduce cost, better manageability, etc).

The decision to go with LiveCycle or Acrobat, really depends on the needs of your client. If they don't anticipate a lot of these forms / data capture, Acrobat 8 can do the trick. As you know, Acrobat 8 incorporate some of the essential server based products' capabilities out of the box. Limitation with Acrobat 8 is that each of the form instance you sent out for data capture from different parities can only support up to a maximum of 500 users. And there is still a decent amount of manual work (importing data specifically) that still has to occur. In the case of a custom solution using livecycle, any repetitive work can be automated, but comes at a higher cost. Another factor to consider, is cost. Each of the LiveCycle servers is tens of thousands per cpu (for specific pricing, please contact your Adobe sales representative.), whereas Acrobat is approximately 500 USD per seat.