Government Bits

Tracking how technology is transforming interaction between governments and citizens.

This week, Adobe made some exciting and industry-changing announcements at the MAX 2013 Conference in Los Angeles. Here is Adobe’s letter addressed to our Creative users across all markets and disciplines about these changes, and below is a quick recap of the key announcements:

1) Major Updates to the Creative Cloud: Adobe announced a significant update to Adobe Creative Cloud, our flagship offering for creatives. Available in June and packed with new features, Creative Cloud reimagines the creative process through a stunning set of “CC” desktop applications and sophisticated cross-device collaboration and publishing capabilities.  See the full press release here.

2) Accelerating our Shift to the Cloud: Adobe has seen enormous industry-wide adoption of its Creative Cloud solution, and we have decided to focus our creative software development efforts on that platform moving forward.  While Adobe Creative Suite® 6 products will continue to be supported and available for purchase, the company has no plans for future releases of Creative Suite or other CS products. Focusing development on Creative Cloud will not only accelerate the rate at which Adobe can innovate but also broaden the type of innovation the company can offer the creative community. See the full press release here.

Also released was a comprehensive description of Adobe’s Creative Cloud for Enterprise offering, as well as an Enterprise FAQ and a short, succinct Government FAQ section.

Adobe MAX Recap for Government

For our Government customers at MAX, the Adobe Gov team hosted a Reception (pictured above) and several lecture sessions, some of which will be available shortly on the MAX website for preview. In the meantime, make sure to catch up on the Key Announcements on video replay, take a look at some of the interesting Technology Sneak Peeks presented, have a look at my photo gallery, and check out this short explainer video about the Creative Cloud vision:

Adobe Government Webinars Coming Soon

Adobe Government also has a short series of webinars planned in upcoming weeks that will address the Creative Cloud vision, value, top features and integration points specific to our Gov customers, as well as new licensing, procurement, IT security and deployment considerations specifically for Public Sector personnel. Please stay tuned to this blog for dates, times and details.

If you haven’t already noticed, Adobe recently leaked a whole bunch of Sneak Peeks of our core Creative Cloud applications, including refreshed versions of all the Professional Video Tools, plus Dreamweaver, Edge Reflow, and of course yesterday’s sneak peek into the future of Photoshop…

Law Enforcement, Forensics and Intelligence agencies across the world have been waiting for this feature since MAX 2011, when Adobe first revealed the above capabilities in an early private Photoshop beta.

This year, Adobe MAX 2013 will be the premiere venue to learn about the latest Creative workflows for print, web, video and mobile design. If sequestration has limited your travel, you might be able to convince your manager with this “Why Attend MAX?” list, which notes a complimentary one-year Creative Cloud subscription for all attendees.

If you can’t convince your manager, make sure to check out our upcoming Digital Government roadshows for the Defense Department, Federal Civilian agencies in Baltimore and Atlanta, as well as our ongoing Executive and Technical Webinar series. If you can’t attend MAX, we will bring it to you!

If indeed you ARE going to Adobe MAX 2013 and are a GovBits reader, you are cordially invited to attend any & all of the Government-specific events taking place at the conference!

Over the past week, my family has been observing the Passover holiday, during which my daughters (ages 7.5 and 5.5) are learning all about the Hebrews’ journeys through the desert of Sinai. During those 40 years, the Hebrews were provided shelter, nourishment and guidance by “Clouds of Glory” which followed their meandering path unceasingly, and became enshrined in the liturgy, ritual practice and common identity of modern Hebrews.

Of course, those Clouds and “the Cloud” we typically discuss in technology provide identical benefits: security, stability, omnipresence, and mobility. These days, without “the Cloud,” our modern technological society would cease functioning; our documents, data, and identities have been inextricably bound into the nebulous digital ether, in which 99.99999% uptime isn’t good enough, and only infinite redundancy is sufficient. 

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the Cloud is no longer a dream for some Government agencies; it’s happening. This week, Business Insider reported that a large Intelligence agency plans an unprecedented, 10-year relationship with Amazon Web Services as a “private cloud” implementor. This is the first of such news from the Intelligence sector, but it’s surely not to be the last.

I can’t pretend to understand the many twisting, churning governmental machinations behind Sequestration, or even Snowquestration, but my imagination paints a number of closed-door, deeply-partisan and highly unpleasant confrontations between legislators who pride themselves on one-upmanship, not unlike how Congressman Francis Underwood deviously masterminds passage of Education Reform in Netflix’s House of Cards. In this case, I believe life likely imitates art, not the other way around.

Regardless of the opaque political process behind cutting $1.2 Trillion from Government agencies over 10 years, uncertainty and discomfort have reverberated across all sectors of Government since Monday. One notable example has resulted in the cancellation of the Defense Intelligence Worldwide conference, which has been a critical hub for industry interaction with the US Intelligence Community for years. Adobe looked very much forward to hosting many of our meetings at our 20×20 booth with bleeding-edge demonstrations, try-it-yourself kiosks and (of course) swag giveaways, so we share the frustration and disappointment that the conference organizers, technology vendors and Gov IT personnel must be feeling right now.

I’m the “cinephile” in my community. I have a regular email list of 10-20 guys whom I’ll ping for impromptu movie nights. When I travel for work, I’m always trying to “sneak in a movie” after hours. During Oscar season I am especially vigilant to try and see as many Best Picture contenders as possible before the Big Night.

This past weekend I saw Zero Dark Thirty. It was particularly interesting to me, as Adobe’s Digital Media solutions consultant for the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community (DoD/IC). As such, I was looking for any sign of Adobe software that might have been used to apprehend suspected terrorists — just as I do when watching Homeland — because hey, I might have sold it to them!

Of course, which specific software is leveraged by which specific agency for which purpose is often classified information. However, I can tell you that many of the latest innovations in Adobe software help keep America safer and more secure, whether it’s for rapid intelligence gathering, secure data dissemination, high-quality visualization, or forensically analyzing and reconstructing digital evidence.

Hi folks! Jerry Silverman here…

Last year, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) outlined its Digital Government Strategy to build a 21st century platform to better serve the American people while saving agencies time and money. Adobe’s response to this Strategy outlines how our history, technical expertise and vision have been mission critical in assisting agencies in their efforts to implement such strategies.

The Adobe Public Sector team’s technical expertise and vision continues to flourish in 2013, and we’re thrilled to welcome two new team members to our ranks: Lisa Niday and Lisa Watkins! They will be regular contributors to this blog on subjects relevant to Digital Media in the Government space. Below is a brief introduction to our Digital Media team:

At Adobe, we are inspired by purpose-driven creativity. Through our technologies, software, and business practices, every day we enable millions of people across the globe to change the world around them for the better, regardless of the industry in which they work.

The above video is an excerpt from a larger “Behind the Splash Screen” video series on Adobe TV that focuses on one member of the core Photoshop engineering team, John Penn II, and his shifting of career focus from core product development to one of cooperation, dialogue and assistance to the US Law Enforcement community. John specifically represents Adobe with agencies like NCMEC and ICAC that work tirelessly to safeguard children from predation and exploitation in the real and digital domains, working closely with imaging, intelligence, investigative and forensics experts across State, Federal and International boundaries to understand and bolster their unique workflows, challenges and needs.

As a father of three small children who are utterly immersed in mobile, networked, “always-on” digital technologies, I certainly perceive the demand for Law Enforcement agencies to stay “up to date” on the latest technological threats to families and communities, especially when it comes to child exploitation, and to continue a high level of dialogue with industry leaders, like Adobe, whose tools and technologies form a critical part of the arsenal. I am extremely proud to count John Penn as an Adobe colleague, a friend, and someone who is helping secure and safeguard the next generation of digital citizens.

I recently spoke with an Adobe customer in the Intelligence Community who wanted to dispel the myth, once and for all, that Creatives don’t dwell in Government;  “We’re not all sad, grey button-pushers here in the Public Sector!” he shouted. “There are tons of engaged, outgoing, creative people who love design!”

After touring across the country on our Roadshow, I’ve seen first-hand evidence that this is true! There has been a sea change of creativity and design-first thinking over the last few years in Government, spearheaded by the refresh of whitehouse.gov and trickling down through organizations like Sunlight Labs and Code for America. Many services like itdashboard.gov, data.gov and usa.gov provide clean, simple, forward-thinking design that bolsters engagement and usability, as well as 508 compliance! Mobile sites and apps, which are inherently usable and design-centric, have exploded across the Public Sector, with many agencies planning well ahead of the curve.

Designers face a unique challenge these days: which medium, screen, surface, platform, runtime, or browser is the most important to design for? When it comes to government, the short answer is: all of them! Constituents demand constant access to government services and data from wherever they happen to be, with whichever media or screen they happen to be confronting, and their experience of those services must be intuitive, compelling and “sticky,” in order to bring them back the next time. The “correct” design methodology for laying out a engaging, adaptable, and accessible interface that complies with the most recent standards, whether they are based in the world of paper, e-readers, motion graphics, or web browsers, is a constantly moving target.

Adobe prides itself in providing design tools and technologies that allow our customers to create exceptional standards-compliant experiences across screens and devices, and this week we are proud to unveil a few projects that we’ve been working on to help the greater design community create, learn and collaborate around new and emerging standards for the web:

1) Adobe Edge Public Preview. Designers can access the recently released Adobe Edge public preview, a new HTML5 web motion and animation tool that allows designers to do Flash Professional-like animation using web standards like HTML, JavaScript and CSS3. While in public preview, Adobe Edge will be a free download.

2) The Expressive Web beta. This new site is both a resource and showcase that highlights some of the most creative and expressive features being added to the web today. In addition to highlighting and providing information on twelve new HTML5 and CSS3 features, the site itself makes extensive use of new web standards to provide a visually compelling resource for learning more about HTML5 and CSS3.

3) Adobe Drive 3. This software enables seamless integration of a digital asset management (DAM) system with Adobe Creative Suite 5 and CS5.5 applications. Once connected to a DAM server, a creative team can access remote assets through their native operating system’s file browser, through Adobe Bridge, or from the menus of CS products that integrate with Drive:  Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and InCopy. The newest version of Drive enables connection to any DAM that implements the CMIS specification, an industry-wide standard.

In addition to these announcements, Adobe has many other projects cooking when it comes to standards compliance across the web and devices. For example, we have released a prototype of a Flash-to-HTML conversion tool codenamed Wallaby.  Check out some more of these projects on our HTML5 home page, and send your designers and web developers to our HTML5 Developer Center for the latest updates.

InDesign CS 5.5 greatly reduces the time and number of steps involved in creating accessible PDFs that people with disabilities can use more effectively. With InDesign CS 5.5, you can establish content reading order and add Alt Text to images right in InDesign without using the XML structure pane. Tables, nested tables, lists, nested lists, footnotes and hyperlinks now translate directly from InDesign to Acrobat. A new feature allows PDF tags to be built into paragraph styles, and improved object anchoring and export options make the entire InDesign to accessible PDF process faster, easier, and more reliable. In a brand-new, two-part video series on Adobe TV that launched today, Adobe worked with Michael Murphy, host of the InDesigner Podcast, to take an in-depth look at all of the new, and improved features in InDesign CS 5.5 that make this possible. In Part I, Michael examines the new features that greatly reduce the time and number of steps involved in creating accessible PDFs, by setting up a content order in the new Articles panel, creating anchored images within a text flow, applying all text and tagging instructions to the images, and mapping paragraph styles to PDF tags. In Part II, he works with a finished InDesign document, exports a PDF, and show how well all the new InDesign CS5.5 features pay off in Acrobat X Pro.

The 2011 Print and ePublishing Conference in Alexandria, VA brought together 400+ graphic artists, visual information specialists, design and creative production managers from around the world for 3 days of learning, networking and swapping valuable industry tricks and tips. This year, a large number of US Government agencies were in attendance, including personnel from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Veteran Affairs, Internal Revenue Service, Department of State, NASA, the Defense Media Activity, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Energy, the US Office of Personnel Management, and many others.

Adobe presented multiple sessions during this conference, including an introduction to What’s New in Creative Suite 5.5 as well as a focused, day-long seminar entitled Designing for the Multiscreen Revolution: HTML5, CSS3 and the Flash Platform (.pdf). Over 300 customers attended these sessions, proving the industry hunger for best practices and tools to move them forward into the new territory of multiscreen design.

One of the hottest topics at this conference included best practices in designing for the ePub format, which is rapidly emerging as the industry standard for distribution of electronic books. As we’ve seen recently in the press, Amazon.com announced that their digital book sales have now exceeded sales of all print titles, both hardcover and paperback combined. As of April 1st, for every 100 print books that Amazon has sold (of any kind) the company moved 105 Kindle books, not including downloads of free titles. As we’ve also seen this year from multiple publishing analysts, 60% of Americans are expected to purchase a tablet device for reading purposes within the next three years. That’s over 150 million Americans! Almost every session in the 3-day outline included some form of ePub or eBook production tutorial, as publishers across the spectrum expect an explosion of devices and reading options for consumers and constituents very soon.

We were also especially honored to have Victoria Richards from SSA co-present with Greg Pisocky of Adobe Accessibility on how the new features inside InDesign CS5.5 help simplify and streamline the creation of 508-compliant PDF documents. And if you’re thinking to yourself, “I wish I’d been in that Accessibility session!” — there’s some good news for you: coming very soon on Adobe TV, we’re posting a 2-part series on all the great new workflow enhancements and productivity features that will cut your PDF remediation time from days to minutes! Keep your eyes peeled here to Government Bits for updates on that.