There was also a transition of Community Managers in the Adobe Community Professionals Program (ACPs) with Marie Nedich now at the helm. Liz Frederick is now engaging with HTML5 and Gaming Developers as part of Adobe’s 2011 strategy shift.  The ACPs and the Freelancers are sooo important to the Adobe User Group program (symbiotic in nature), because in most cases they are the only speaking assets the Adobe Community can routinely rely upon to speak at their events.  Adobe Evangelist were super busy in 2012 with the release of all those new products; Edge Tools, and of course, the Creative Cloud. This why we have community programs like the ACPs and Freelancers.

Now, the Creative Suite Product team did do an excellent job with the CS6 Pre-Launch TechWed NDA Webinars.  The Community often remarked that CS6 was the best prepared launch that Adobe has ever done; and, we took extra steps to get the community up to speed and educated about the Creative Cloud.Special Thank You to Tricia Lawrence (Adobe Creative Suite Team), Scott Morris (Creative Cloud) and ALL of the TechWED speakers for their efforts (12 webinar sessions, over 3000+ attendees; avg 125/session) in keeping the community informed, it very likely impacted the Creative Cloud membership adoption rates.There were over 30 CS6 & Community events in 2012 in North America, reaching over 10,000 community members.

We still have much more education to do in 2013 about Creative Cloud Team, so I suspect there will be additional Adobe Community Events in 2013. In 2013, there will likely be changes in the way we measure program participation in both the Adobe User Group and Adobe Community Professionals Program, stay tuned for that.

Looking forward to AdobeMAX the content, people, and community activities may be different than in past years and this should be a good thing. MAX will be more reflective of where Adobe is heading as a company. (More about the Adobe Community activities at AdobeMAX in a later post). I would urge all ACPs and User Group Managers to attend this year and look at the content schedule for MAX…it’s different this year!

Thank You! To All the Adobe User Group Manager & ACPs for an incredible year. It is a pleasure being your Community Mgr  – Aaron Houston Adobe Community Mgr No America