ARena

A little late I know, but here’s a round-up of the Adobe releases from December 2007

Flash news:

First up some news about developments in the Flash world. At the beginning of December we announced Flash Media Server 3 which "offers streaming media and real-time communication capabilities to the broadest possible audience. With industry standard H.264 video capabilities and High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio support, Adobe Flash Media Server 3 provides content owners with increased protection for streaming high quality video and allows for the delivery of interactive media applications that work consistently across multiple browsers and operating systems." Read the details here.

To tie in with this announcement, Adobe also announced that the latest version of Flash Player 9 (available to download here) now includes H.264 standard video support. Essentially that means that your PC can be a HiDef media player. As Kevin says: "The inclusion of industry standard H.264 support in Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR, the Adobe Creative Suite® product line and Adobe Flash Media Server 3 brings new HD capabilities to millions of Flash developers and a new generation of viewers who are turning to the Web as the place to find their favorite shows and video content." Read the full release here.

RIA news:

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) has announced that they plan to adopt Flex and LiveCycle Data Services for its new Mission Support System.  Read the release here. According to NATO: "Adobe Flex is accepted worldwide and provides us with a new opportunity to automate the flight preparation process and save valuable time. It goes without saying that it is crucial for the NATO crew to have access to relevant information. The visual electronic maps present all the information in an intuitive manner which makes the MSS very user-friendly."

Still on the RIA theme, Adobe has also announced plans to open source elements of LiveCycle Data Services. Essentially we have released the source code for remoting and messaging technologies under a new open source product named BlazeDS. Read the release here, or access the code here. For more information on Adobe’s approach to Open Source, go here.

Corporate news:

Adobe announced Q4 (and FY07) financial results on December 17th – for the first time breaking the $3b per annum revenue milestone.  Read the release here.  For completeness, we also announced the Adobe Board of Directors has approved a 30 million share increase to the stock repurchase program announced in April 2007. Read about that here.

A few years ago I don’t think anyone would have described Adobe as a company that took full advantage of the open source community. But that is all changing with the announcement today that
Adobe plans to release the source code for the Flex SDK to open source
under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). You can read the full press release here.

As James puts it: "Open source co-creation is a powerful way to build a strong development community. Adobe’s decision to open source the Flex SDK is a radical move which should attract a new class of developer to the platform."

This is the fourth open/standard announcement by Adobe since the end of last year, first we contributed the source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation under the Tamarin project; then we announced the use of the open source WebKit engine in the “Apollo” project; and third we released the full PDF 1.7 specification for ISO standardization.

As the blogsphere starts commenting on this announcement I’ll pull together the links. As always, if you would like more information, drop me an email.

Adobe’s second BIG PARTNER announcement in just over a week.  Last week was the news that Adobe and salesforce.com were working together on the Flex toolkit for Apex. This week comes the announcement that Adobe and SAP are collaborating on a new product, the SAP® Enterprise Learning environment.

From the press release: "SAP Enterprise Learning environment will help enable organizations to more easily conduct, measure and track virtual classes while allowing employees to collaborate in real-time with instructors and other learners. SAP and Adobe also announced that they have entered into a global reseller agreement that allows SAP to market and sell Acrobat Connect Professional as a standalone solution for enterprise-class Web-conferencing and collaborative communication."

Read the release here (or here if you want to see it on the SAP site!).

Little bit late on the Customer Round-up for March, but I’ve pulled together a Public Sector focused round-up this month.

Kane County Circuit Court -
The Kane County Circuit Court Clerk understands first-hand the importance of delivering fast, efficient services to citizens. As the fifth largest county in Illinois, Kane County court staff manages over 150,000 cases annually, ranging from simple traffic violations to serious felonies. At the same time, the Circuit Court Clerk’s office is responsible for handling citizen requests for orders of protection, which typically involve domestic violence cases.

Kane County were looking to improve the quality of services that victims of domestic violence receive when they came to the county for help. Historically it could take up to six hours to process an order of protection – and the office wanted to dramatically reduce that time.

To improve and streamline the processes, Kane County is using a web-based solution, powered by Adobe LiveCycle and Flex solutions to transform how orders of protection are accessed, completed, submitted, reviewed, and approved. The more integrated, automated processes translate into enhanced citizen services that can be delivered faster, more conveniently, and more cost effectively than ever.

The automated process built around Adobe LiveCycle software is dramatically faster than the previous manual process. Within approximately sixty seconds of having a judge sign the document, an order of protection arrives at the sheriff’s office for input into the national wanted persons database. Overall, Kane County have seen seen as much as a five-fold improvement in the time it takes to complete, submit, and process orders of protection.

Berlin -The procurement process for hiring construction sector workers to work on federal projects in Germany is especially time-consuming and costly due to the complicated application procedure. The process begins with a job announcement in a publication such as the federal job site listing. Companies submit written bids along with the necessary job application forms. To send these documents, the respective office charges the bidder administrative, copying, and shipping costs, fees usually amounting to at least €20. The bidder then fills out the documents by hand and sends the entire bid in a sealed envelope to the respective administrative office. Confidentiality is of great importance as the offers are only opened and read after the submission deadline.

In an attempt to improve this extremely time consuming process, the state of Berlin began advertising its jobs electronically in 2004, and at the same time began a project to make the whole process on-line whilst ensuring the process adhered to the strict confidentially and other German federal laws.

The state of Berlin used an Adobe LiveCycle and PDF based solution to reduced government and industry costs for completing and processing project bids; simplified bid completion and selection processes; increased transparency of bid selection; minimized errors on bids by reducing manual processes; and accelerated bid review by integrating electronic forms with backend systems

Court of Cremona – The Italian legal system has traditionally managed case documents using paper-based processes that can drain resources, slow court proceedings, and impede collaboration across legal teams. As a result, legal staff—including magistrates, lawyers, court clerks, and administrators—often find themselves working in challenging conditions. To improve processes, the Court of Cremona wanted to adopt an information system that could help ensure “conditions of parity” between all parties involved in proceedings, a requirement stipulated in the Italian Constitution.To accomplish this goal, the court set out to implement a cost-effective, easy-to-use system that would dramatically reduce the amount of paper used during proceedings. Ideally, the solution could be deployed and maintained by government staff.

In 2003, the Court of Cremona began running technology tests and pilot schemes using PDF files to share digital documents among parties working on preliminary hearings. The approach is integrated into a system called DIGIT and has so far saved more than €356,000 since automating the management of case documents; eliminated the need to copy, route, and manage millions of pages of case proceedings annually; improved information sharing and availability across legal teams and court staff; and addressed government requirements stipulating reliable, secure access to case documents for all parties involved in hearings

‘Once the most hated technology online, Flash has become one of the most loved.’

Coverage has appeared today in The Guardian about the changing perceptions of Flash – from 99% Bad in the late 1990′s (Skip intro anyone?) to "the new publishing tool of the (21st) century".

On January 29, Adobe announced that it intends to release the full PDF 1.7 specification to the Association for Information and Image Management International (AIIM) for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

According to Kevin Lynch – Chief Software Architect at Adobe: “Today’s announcement is the next logical step in the evolution of PDF from de facto standard to a formal, de jure standard. By releasing the full PDF specification for ISO standardization, we are reinforcing our commitment to openness. As governments and organizations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organization will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years.”

Seems to me that this move means we can put to rest the "is it/isn’t it" arguement around PDF’s openness?

The press release and FAQ can be found here and here, and if you would like to know more please email me and I will direct the requests to the most suitable people in Adobe!

Also, here are a selection of articles and news following the announcement:

Duane Nickuls (Adobe) – http://technoracle.blogspot.com/2007/01/pdf-specification-released-to-aiimiso.html

Cote (RedMonk) -http://www.redmonk.com/cote/2007/01/29/one-last-thing-pdf-as-an-open-standard/

CNet – http://news.com.com/Adobe+to+send+PDF+to+standards+group/2100-1012_3-6154067.html?tag=nefd.pulse

InfoWorld – http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/29/HNadobepdfspec_1.html?source=rss&url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/29/HNadobepdfspec_1.html

Silicon.com – http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39165491,00.htm

ZDNet -http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39285663,00.htm

eWeek – http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2088277,00.asp

Mercury News – http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/technology/16572272.htm

Personal Computer World – http://www.pcw.co.uk/personal-computer-world/news/2173696/adobe-offers-pdf-open-standard

CRN – http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml;jsessionid=ANQ3Y3AJJPLP0QSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleId=197001260

VNUNet – http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2173723/adobe-submits-pdf-open-standard

PCPro – http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/103349/adobe-moves-towards-iso-standardisation-for-pdf.html

OK, so I’m pretty behind with keeping ARena up to date, but then who isn’t behind with their blogging?

I’ve been out and about a recently. I was at the Flash on the Beach event in Brighton and the JavaPolis event in Antwerp recently.  Both very interesting events for different reasons.

I was only at these events for one day, so i didn’t get to see too much, but a couple of highlights are:

Flash on The Beach – The Adobe speakers at this event demo’d some great Apollo and Flex applications Whilst this isn’t from FOTB, it does show how Apollo will be integrating Flash, Flex, HTML and PDF technologies!

JavaPolis – It was great to see thousands of Java developers getting excited about what Flex can do to help them create rich and "engaging" applications using both Java and Flex technologies. Now I’m no developer – which I guess is why I work marketing, but after James Ward from Adobe demonstrated how Flex can integrate with Hibernate and Spring I thought I really ought to give Flex a go. That’s a little project for me over Christmas – depending on what else Santa brings I guess!

Anyway, as a pre-Christmas treat, here is an update on some of the latest news from Adobe…

Adobe Releases Beta Version of Photoshop CS3 – I don’t normally blog about the "creative" products from Adobe (let me know if you want me to), but this is pretty big news.  Adobe has posted the beta of our next version of Photoshop (mac and windows) to allow customers to test drive the product and to more easier see how the next version of Photoshop will perform on the latest hardware platforms, particularly the MacTel platform!

Adobe Reports Record Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2006 Revenue – Adobe reported Q4FY06 revenues of $682.2million and FY06 revenues of £2.575billion – a 31% increase year-on-year. Lifted from the press release, Bruce Chizen, Adobe chief executive officer, said, “Fiscal 2006 was another year of solid financial performance for Adobe. We generated record revenue, and for the fourth consecutive year, achieved double digit revenue growth. At the same time, we successfully integrated Macromedia, leveraging our combined assets to provide platform-level solutions that redefine the way people engage with ideas and information.”

We had some great customer wins across the business and across the world – I’ll provide more detailed write-ups in the new year.

Adobe Delivers Acrobat Connect Product Line for Instantaneous Web Conferencing – I know I’m (obviously) totally partisan when talking about Adobe products, but Connect is great. Every time I use it I’m totally blown away by the "richness" of the experience – and it always provokes a "WOW" reaction from people using it for the first time.

Adobe Announces Availability of Adobe Reader 8 – "enables trusted information exchange between enterprises, government agencies, constituents and consumers who view, print, search, digitally sign and collaborate with PDF files. Adobe Reader 8 also features a new “Start Meeting” button that launches Adobe Acrobat Connect session". It has got a great new UI also!

So, something for everyone hopefully!

I know a number of analysts like to work from a Linux desktop, so for them – and anyone else interested in Linux – I thought I’d point you to the news that the beta of Flash Player 9 for Linux is now live. The download can be found here and the FAQ can be found here.

A bunch of Adobe folks have blogged about this here, here and here!!

A few very interesting announcement from Adobe over the last couple of week.  I’ll cover them in reverse order – most recent first.

First up, I have just swapped mobiles to the new Samsung D900 – the first European handset that uses Flash to drive the menus and the UI.  It also has a cool "uGo" wallpaper that changes when the phone is in different cities – very cool!! So with this in mind it’s great to see that we will be extending the Flash Lite technology with the announced yesterday that Adobe is acquiring some "vector graphics technology" developed by a French company called Actimagine. The reason behind the acquisition is to extend the reach of Adobe’s mobile technologies to high-volume, mass market devices.

Second up, Adobe is currently taking part in the SIBOS conference in Sydney at the moment and it’s great to see us making some significant announcements with significant players in the verticals in which we are active.  The SIBOS announcement - made with Intel and Tradocs – aims to streamline and automate the international flow of trade documents and give supply-chain partners the "ability to drive compliant workflows for inter-corporate information exchange and routing of trade documents to banks through the SWIFT Trade Services Utility platform utilizing PDF".

Last, but not least, comes this announcement making the launch of Adobe Contribute 4.I’ve been using the beta of Contribute 4 to author this blog for the last few months.  I’m about to upgrade to the full release version.  I love it for blogging – very easy and intuitive to use.

As always, if you want more information on any of the above, drop me an email.

John Landwehr has posted about protecting corporate board materials and confidential information on his blog.