The focus for our August TSUNAMI release has been all about responding to our top (at least 1 and 2) feature requests. So, what’s in the box? (Sign up or log in to the Collaboration Service Developer Portal to download the SDK and get to work!)

1. SCREEN SHARING.
Available now. Just as you have components for publishing and subscribing to audio and web cameras, there’s a simple set of new components : ScreenSharePublisher and ScreenShareSubscriber.

We’re exposing the add-in technology used for ConnectNow to allow screen capture – when invoked within the Flash Player, the ScreenSharePublisher pops up an (almost) invisible add-in, which it controls. The publisher (in the regular Player) has a full set of APIs for controlling the add-in, and the experience it quite good. We’re still working on getting the right branding in place for the add-in, and we’re looking at remote-control for a future release, but the standard screensharing features are all there for you to develop with. Viewing a shared screen is a matter of using a ScreenShareSubscriber within the regular Flash Player. As always, we’re releasing early and often, so there’s lots of time to make improvements – if you spot bugs or things you don’t like (or just want to praise us, that’s cool too), the forums are staffed with our fanatical dev team.

2. RECORDING AND PLAYBACK.
Just like it says – record and download, then playback everything that happened in your collaborative session, whether audio, video, or data. We’re playing this one a little closer to the vest, and releasing it as a private beta – we still need to work on stress-testing the service at high loads, so we want to let developers in a little more gradually to help out. If you’d like to join the recording beta – send us a mail with “Recording Beta” in the subject, to LCCS@<the company offering Adobe LCCS>.com.

3. LCCS JAVASCRIPT SDK.
We’ve heard a lot of folks tell us that they’d like to add real-time audio / video to their HTML forms, as well as make the forms collaborative. Our standard question was “so, are you willing to replace all your existing HTML UI with Flash?”, the answer to which was often the sound of crickets chirping sadly in the distance. The JS APIs are nice in that if you need audio/video, put a SWF next to your HTML content, and code the collaborative form by adding simple JS code to your existing HTML. No more rip-and-replace of work you’ve already done!

4. NEW DOMAIN!
Yes, our old domain was confusing. Our new one is just common sense. The developer portal? http://collaboration.adobelivecycle.com. Room URLs? http://collaboration.adobelivecycle.com/<accountName>/<roomName>. No need to worry, all your old domains and URLs will continue working as they always have.

5. NEW LOOK!

Fire-red was so 2009; Icy-blue is the new heat!

LEARN MORE

If you are attending FITC in San Francisco, be sure to check out our session to learn more about these new features, Wednesday, 2:30pm. We’re also thinking of hosting a webinar to demo some of the new goodies – reply in the comments if you’d be interested, so we can see if it’s worth scheduling.

We look forward to seeing some great applications built using these new features, and as always, our forums are open for your questions and feedback.

Learn more about LCCS.
Sign up for a FREE Developer Account, download the SDK, and get to developing.

The line up for the upcoming SF event is pretty crazy – you’ve got your Natzkes and Nakamuras, your Moocks and Michelles, your Skinners and Subramaniams; for real, it’s pretty much a who’s who of the Flash community spanning the last decade, all packed into a 3-day event in SF. I’ve already decided which talks I’m going to see, and which speakers to stalk.

And hey, me too! I’ll be there to present on the Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service (shocking!).

This one should be fun – the tone of FITC lends itself to showing stuff that’s a bit more experimental and cool. Ok, I’m not Keith Peters, but I will say that we’re going to show some pretty crazy, highly requested new functionality for LCCS… This will be the first time we’ll be able to do public demos of it. Expect to be wowed, and to come away ready to build some amazing multi-user apps. Tuesday, August 17. 2:30pm. Be there.

If that weren’t enough, there’s a whole whack of other fine Adobe folks going to be there to get your feedback and answer questions – if you’ve always wanted Ted Patrick‘s autograph, I can’t think of a better venue for getting it.

In summary : If I was you, I’d be buying tickets to this. Early bird pricing ends July 2nd. Also, apparently my name holds great power – use code “npegg” for 10% off.

Here’s the description :

The Collaboration service enables developers to easily add real-time collaboration and social capabilities to their applications. The service is implemented as LiveCycle Collaboration Service (LCCS). LCCS provides a hosted infrastructure that lets developers add collaboration capabilities to applications rapidly. Adobe hosts the service so developers don’t have to worry about deployment, maintenance, and scalability. Some examples of applications with collaborative capabilities include social games, customer service applications, e-learning solutions and sports broadcasts. Join Nigel Pegg to learn how to add collaboration to new and existing applications.

Come Join Us – Check the box in the top-left of the page, and click register. It’s free, it’s easy, and who wouldn’t want to spend an hour with me?

1. Pay-per-Use via Payment Card: This is already available today, and it’s a easy, low-cost way to get started. It’s perfect for smaller projects or for folks who just want to pay as you go.
2. Concurrency via a Specialist: This new purchase option is an annual subscription model based on peak concurrent connections — so, no more bandwidth, messages, user minutes. For each concurrent connection you buy, you can consume as much as you need. This model is great for large projects with high-volume usage and for those who need a more predictable cost model. You can simply estimate the concurrency needed from your total customer base. Full-time support coverage and a service level guarantee are also included. For more information on this option, contact a specialist at 888-649-2990 or request a consultation.
3. Become an OEM Partner: This is an option for those who want to OEM LCCS as it gives you some leeway to structure a more customized agreement. The goal of the program is to work with partners to find a “win-win” model. As an example, a profit sharing arrangement might work here. We’ll need to work with you to understand your business model to better construct an agreement, but if you’d like to go down this path, request to become an OEM partner.
4. Single-Tenant via ConnectSolutions: This option is perfect for customers that need dedicated hosting (single-tenant) and customized deployments of LCCS. Unlike the multi-tenant model provide by Adobe, you can work with ConnectSolutions to construct a custom Service Level Agreement. For more information, please visit the ConnectSolutions website.

If you have questions about what this is all about or need helped deciding which model works best for you, please visit us in our forums.

As product folks, this kinda bummed us out. There were so many big things we’d wanted to do, new use-cases we knew we could unlock for users, if we could just… get… back… to… work…. Enter : the April LCCS Feature Explosion!

We decided to set a longer-term release target (5 months, which is RIDICULOUSLY long for us, but factors in the holidays), and chase some bigger whales this time around. Let’s introduce a few of them – as usual, you can download the SDK by logging into the dev portal.

Server-to-Server HTTP APIs – Publish and subscribe to messages from your own server to ours, from the comfort of HTTP. Manage user roles, create and configure nodes – this allows your server to be the OWNER of a room, and enforce business logic over things going on there. Build a chat with profanity filtering or auto-translation, allow your server to be the dealer in a poker game, or subscribe to messages to keep a transcript of a session. This one’s been a long time coming – help us validate that we’ve nailed it!

New Flash Player 10.1 libraries, for unlocking the crazy new P2P APIs in the next player :
:: P2P group data messaging – take any node and configure it to be P2P, and run whiteboards, chat, or other shared models without passing messages through the LCCS service.
:: Audio / Video multicast – great for broadcasting to large groups, this allows the recipients of your A/V streams to help republish those streams, vastly reducing the load on the original publisher, and allowing you to scale to a much higher number of recipients.

Large room support – We know that people want to be able to use LCCS rooms as “lobbies” or landing rooms where they can stay connected to the service in order to receive messages around where to go next. By changing their presence settings, these lobbies can now easily support 5000 users (actually, waaay more, but we’re capping it for now until we’ve finished some other tuning).

Buddy List presence – This goes really well with large lobby rooms. You can easily allow users to declare a list of their “buddies”, who’ll be the only people able to see that user’s presence. If you wanted to build large-scale presence networks, these APIs will do the trick.

Private streams – We’ve made it much, much easier to have publishers decide who in the room they’d like to stream their A/V to. Simply set a list of users on the publisher, and you’re off to the races.

Multiple private message recipients – this one’s been requested forever, and we’re kicking ourselves for not getting to it sooner (sorry Faizan). Simply specify your list of recipients on the message, and it gets delivered to them all.

Cluster-wide support of RTMFP. No more ‘protocol=”rtmfp”‘ needed – if you compile against the player 10 libs, this just happens by default (you can still opt out of course!). In fact, you can REQUIRE that users only come in via RTMFP.

A jillion bugfixes. Thanks so much to everyone on the forums for keeping at us to make things better. We definitely need your help now – start trying the new stuff, and report whatever seems wrong or broken. The next release won’t take 5 months, promise =).

Money quote from Mike Fulkerson, who is a cool guy by the way and an e-learning guru, “With the integrated voice over IP (VoIP), streaming video, instant messaging, multiuser rooms, and other capabilities in Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service, we were able to get TOTALe up and running faster and accelerate our time to market…”

With TOTALe built using LCCS and the Flash Platform, Rosetta Stone has created a successful new model for language learning based on unique interactivity and social media features. TOTALe also offers a solid foundation for Rosetta Stone to rapidly build and deploy additional advanced RIAs–one that consumes few internal resources and allows the company to take advantage of Adobe’s cloud computing infrastructure to alleviate ongoing IT staff burdens and reduce costs. Here are some of the measurable results that Rosetta Stone has achieved with LCCS:

• Accelerated application development by as much as 75%• Created prototype solution in one month with small team• Acquired new users and opened new revenue stream• Deployed to user base on multiple platforms with ease• Took advantage of hosted Adobe services to reduce IT burdens

(Ok, for those who have been following us, you might have noticed a name change. More on that later, but Iet’s focus on the main news here.)

LCCS is available worldwide and can be purchased today with a payment card. For detailed information on our pay-per-use pricing model, please check out the Pricing FAQ.

With LCCS, developers can easily add real-time, multi-user collaboration and social capabilities into their rich Internet applications. Social games are a common example, but users are increasingly requiring similar real-time interactions in other applications, such as online customer service, e-learning, and more.

For more information about LCCS, including examples and videos, learn more on the Adobe Developer Connection and our forums. Getting started is free, so sign up and give it a try now!

Today, we can finally take the wraps off a partnership that we’ve forged with Rosetta Stone, who announced TOTALe, an online language-learning platform. With TOTALe, they’ve web-enabled their language courses and created an interactive, engaging learning community using the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service.

You can check out the video below to get a feeling of what it’s like, but I had the opportunity to sit through several hours of the classroom environment (Rosetta Studio) as well as try their social gaming activities (Rosetta World), and was blown away with how rich a social medium an application in the browser could be. Students were whispering to help each other, one was clearly the “class clown” — the classroom and social interactions between the students and teacher really shone through.

It’s our belief that the web experience is transforming from one that has largely been solo to one that is highly connected to others. And with AFCS, we want to be at the forefront of this shift towards the Social Web, and make it easier for everyone to add real-time social features into their rich Internet applications. Rosetta’s new solution built-on AFCS is a great example of this.See screenshots of Nigel and me dueling it out in a Rosetta World game … One … Two … Three …If you want to learn more about AFCS and what it offers, we will be at MAX. Check out the sessions that we’re planning and sign up!

Lots of exciting stuff! Sign up and register for these sessions, space is always limited.