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The Fiatech Technology Conference delivered once again. For those of you who are not familiar with Fiatech or more importantly have not joined Fiatech need to engage. I attend and sit through countless presentations that identify the issues that the industry currently faces, but what continues to impress me about this organization is it is delivering solutions for its members and giving a direction to the technology companies as it relates to standards. The conference started with James Porter of DuPont not saying if they were going to implement ISO 15926 but how they were going to require it. This was a very strong statement, and really indicates how far and viable ISO 15926 standard has become in truly addressing Interoperability. Fiatech has delivered in many respects and now it is your opportunity to use and capitalize on it. Adobe was able to participate in an emerging technology panel that gave us an opportunity to present our vision and direction. For those of you who were unable to attend I would like to share some of this with you as well as give you some thoughts and opinions as it relates to the conference.
I think the first question we have to answer is why did Adobe join Fiatech? The reason we joined Fiatech was because of their commitment to process improvement and to standards. We felt that this closely aligned with our vision and our own commitment to open standards. In January 2007 we released the entire pdf specification (ISO 32000) for ISO approval and it was recently approved in January 2008 by a unanimous vote. This follows our PDF/A and PDF/X ISO standard, and we are expecting the publication of PDF/E later this spring. As a technology provider we feel that we have the platform and technology vision to become a crucial piece to the overall solution as it relates to interoperability. Last but not least, we wanted to give Fiatech’s membership base a face to Adobe, and the ability to engage with us.
The second question we have to address is how does Adobe address Interoperability? I think anyone who uses the term Interoperability should have to define it. At Adobe, we define the term Interoperability as the non-ability to connect People, Process and Systems. The way in which we begin to address interoperability is with what we call our engagement platform. Our engagement platform consists of the Free Adobe Reader, Flash Player and now Adobe AIR. With the Free Adobe Reader being installed on 89% of desktops, the Flash Player installed on 98% of desktops and our emerging technology Adobe AIR; it gives you your engagement platform with your customer, engineer, architect, contractor, whomever you choose to communicate with.
Most would agree that we have done a very good job in solving several of the document interoperability issues. The PDF file format is one of the de facto standard’s that is used widely within the industry today. The outstanding question though is what are we going to do about data interoperability? To address data interoperability you have to understand the PDF file format. A PDF document is truly an intelligent document. It has a presentation layer which most of you are familiar with. Then it has a business logic layer which includes things such as our forms, calculations, validations, and security. The last and probably most important layer, in starting to address data interoperability, is the transport layer. The PDF document is built upon an XML schema. Therefore you can transport data irrespective of the application.
To facilitate the document and data exchange described above we have an enterprise suite of applications called LiveCycle. When you think about Acrobat and many of features today, LiveCycle has the ability to automate several of those processes. More importantly it also has its own core set of product offerings such as Workflow and Digital Rights Management. Think about a process that we all face today and that is on boarding and off boarding employees. A new employee needs a phone, a computer, and email address, benefits, insurance, and the list goes on and on. Think about all the legacy applications you have today that support these processes. LiveCycle would give you the ability to connect all these applications together, but more importantly in a lot of cases give you a pdf or even a flash/flex front end. It is recognizable to the end user, but more importantly the data is pushed and pulled between the respective applications. On top of this other companies have the ability to license our technology and include it as part of their product offering. Companies like SAP, Documentum, and Bentley have licensed some of this technology and included it in their own applications. In summary for document and data interoperability, we have the platforms, transport mechanisms and enterprise applications to support it.
Now for the last and most dangerous question, how is Adobe going to support ISO 15926? The honest answer is I don’t know at this point, but this is again why we joined the Fiatech organization. Let me tell you my opinion though as it relates to ISO 15926 and we can even include BIM in this conversation. The success of these standards will come down to open standards which is where every company should focus as it relates to these initiatives. To better explain this, say that we developed technology to address a pain point related to a specific 3D CAD application. What happens when this CAD application releases a new version? If we focus on the standard though, the technology we develop should continue to provide a solution.
Okay, enough Adobe Kool-Aid for the moment. How about Aidan Chopra with Google showing up to the Fiatech conference and delivering a great presentation? For those of you who were not in attendance, Aidan’s presentation pre-conference was aptly titled Google, Google on the wall who is the most prepared of them all? By the time he delivered his presentation he had renamed it to “What the ?/%&$ (let’s assume the word heck) is Google doing here???”. For those of you who were not there, this was the last day of the conference at 8 am, and you also have to remember this was in New Orleans. So there were a lot of red eyes in the audience. I can honestly say that I have not laughed this hard during an industry presentation. He was very effective in tying the Sketchup, 3D Warehouse and Google Earth together in a very dynamic way and probably only in a way that Aidan could do.
I sat through the majority of presentations and I would have to say the content really flowed well. I can honestly say that I don’t feel like I was power pointed to death leaving the conference. Most of the presentations were discussions and most were targeted at the industry issues versus sales pitches. I think this is what makes the conference so successful. There are so many highlights that it would be impossible to cover each one in this blog entry. It was great to have the conference in New Orleans and to support their rebuilding efforts. As they would say, Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez.
To end this entry or novel, I am going to leave you with two words: engage and execute. Continue to engage with the ISO 15926 effort and execute on what Fiatech has delivered. Again, we feel like we have the technology platform and the vision in place to be able to deliver solutions as it relates to these standards. We look forward to working with Fiatech and becoming an overall piece of the solution.
Have fun,
Jonathan