Recently, some of the most prominent and active Community Help moderators have been welcomed to the ACE program as part of the “class of 2009″. So here are the folks who voluntarily support Community Help through continuous engagement with the community:

- Gerhard Koren, all Adobe products
- Sven Brencher, all Adobe products
- Lori Kassuba, Acrobat
- Lutz Albrecht, After Effects
- Alexandre Czetwertynski, After Effects
- Rick Gerard, After Effects
- Herve Girolet, Web Development
- David Hogue, Fireworks
- Matt Stow, Fireworks
- Sean McCormack, Lightroom
- Gene McCullagh, Lightroom
- Gerald Singelmann, InDesign
- Geoff Walker, Lightroom
- Chris Tarantino, Photoshop
- Michael Mayerle, Photoshop
- Yves Chatain, Photoshop

Kudos to all of them! And a big “thank you” to our Adobe community!

If your favorite ColdFusion resource is not included, don’t despair. Just contact one of the folks managing the search engine with your suggestion.

Enjoy! And let us hear how you find the search.

Enjoy!

What we’ve done recently in Community Help was to release a set of OpenSearch plugins that do just that: they make your browser’s search field point to a custom search engine dedicated to your favorite Adobe product. So if you’re an avid ColdFusion programmer or Photoshop power user, you can trigger a search right from your browser, which will serve high-quality results for that particular product.

Read along to see how this works.

Installation

When you browse or search the Community Help website , you will be prompted to install the OpenSearch plugin for that particular Adobe product in your browser. (you need to select your favorite product, such as After Effects, Dreamweaver, Flash, or Photoshop)When the pop-up appears, please select “Add it” to install the plugin.Once you add the plugin to your browser, you’ll be able to initiate searches for that particular Adobe product right from your browser.If you don’t like the idea, you can simply dismiss the pop-up by closing it, and we’ll never bother you again with that question.Troubleshooting: If you need to re-install the plugin, but you cannot get to the pop-up again, please delete the ach-opensearch cookie from your browser. This is a temporary work-around, until we implement a landing page where you will be able to choose to (re)install any of the plugins.

How it’s build

This feature is made possible by OpenSearch, a set of open source XML-based formats for sharing of search results among applications.So try it and let us know how it works for you!

First, there are our friends over at Google…
“Adobe is using Google Site Search as part of Creative Suite 4′s Community Help to connect suite customers to Help content on and off Adobe.com.”

And our very own John Nack doing a guest spot on the official Google Blog:
“We’ve plugged the whole community brain trust right into the Suite and used the power of Google Site Search to do it. Creative Suite 4 customers can find fast, relevant information from our online communities, without ever having to leave their desktop work environments, making design faster and more fun.”

Followed by a round-up from the following sites:CNET By Stephen Shankland“There are plenty of sites with Lightroom development presets, Photoshop editing recipes, Flash programming tips, and other such information, so if successful, the Adobe site–in beta for now–could be a more effective way to dig up what’s online.”SearchEngineWatch.com
By Nathania Johnson“Adobe released Creative Suite 4 this week and included with the update is a Google Site Search-powered help feature. Google Site Search is used with the new Adobe Community Help, which harnesses the power of social media and online communities to provide another source of support.”iTWireBy Stephen Withers“Now a mainstream vendor has realised it can make life easier for its customers by tapping into the wealth of unofficial support information that’s available on the web … Adobe Creative Suite 4 is linked to the company’s Community Help site. This uses Google Site Search to selectively index “the best online content from the Adobe community” as well as Adobe’s own reference material and tutorials.”Oh … and by the way, some folks also noticed that we actually published our CS4 Help systems BEFORE ship… Yes, we meant to do that.InDesignSecrets.comBy David Blatner“I’m kind of shocked to report this, but the entire documentation for InDesign CS4 has been released on the Web at Adobe.com. Bob Bringhurst, lead docs writer for InDesign and InCopy reported this news today.”PubliciousBy Mike RankinNews of CS4 is all over the place, but you can’t buy the programs yet. However, you can read and download the entire Help files for InDesign and InCopy CS4. They are free and open to the public. Yeah, it’s a little like reading the script to a movie that hasn’t been released yet.If you find any additional mentions you’d like to send along, slap a comment here on the page and we’ll add ‘em to our scrapbook.

As an Adobe product user, we know you have many places to look for answers and many choices for learning and support content. What if there were a way to get those answers exactly when you need them? And what if you could also learn from others’ experiences or get mutual support and ideas from expert peers?

Creative Suite 4 introduces Adobe Community Help, an integrated online environment for instruction, inspiration, and support. Community Help combines content from Adobe Help, Support, Design Center, Developer Connection, and Forums—along with great online community content—so that users can easily find the best and most up-to-date resources. Access tutorials, technical support, online product help, videos, articles, tips and techniques, blogs, examples, and much more.

Community Help enables users to contribute content and add comments to all learning content on Adobe.com. And now it’s also easier to find and browse support and learning content on Adobe.com, with new product Learning and Support Centers that integrate troubleshooting, online product help, articles and examples by designers and developers all on one web page, along with a powerful search tool.

Community Help features will soon be available in all languages. Additionally, products in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Japanese will include community content and comments, moderated by Adobe and community experts.

Finding the right content

Currently in public beta and soon to be released with Creative Suite 4, Adobe Community Help relies on a new approach to search called Custom Search, an enterprise tool from Google. This tool enables us to selectively index only the most relevant information from Adobe from the highest-quality community sites.Our Custom Search index includes content such as product Help, language references, TechNotes, Developer Connection articles, and Design Center tutorials, as well as the best online content from the Adobe community. Adobe is working with local professionals in North America, Europe and Asia—designers and developers who use Adobe products every day—to identify learning and troubleshooting content to add to our custom search engine. This means that you find the focused answers you need faster than with standard web searches.

Expert users around the world have shared their knowledge of Adobe products on the web—in articles, forum posts, tutorials, blogs, examples, videos, and more. Their day-to-day experiences inform and inspire other designers and developers. We’re adding the best of these sites to our custom index. Community experts help Adobe determine what new content should be developed. Because Community Help is online, we can continuously add and update content after our product release. We plan to add more real world examples of code and design as users find new and creative ways to apply Creative Suite 4 to their design and development challenges.

If you find a valuable web page or community site, please send us feedback or post a comment here on this blog.

Community participation

Community Help comprises content from people across the Adobe community. Community participation—from sharing comments and resources to getting feedback—enhances the value of that content for everyone. You can contribute to this collective expertise in many ways, whether you share an article, a great learning website, or an idea.

Comments are an easy way to lend your expertise to a specific learning article or topic. Commenting is enabled on Creative Suite 4 instructional content on Adobe.com, as well as Flex 3 and Photoshop Lightroom 2. Your comment can include code samples, tips, undocumented scenarios, or links to additional resources. Or you can identify an error or typo in the text. If your contribution is helpful, you will earn Adobe Community points that you can use to grow your community reputation or earn nomination to be an expert moderator for Community Help.

If you can’t find the right resource to help you with your product, you can post a question for other community members to answer. We want to know when there is missing content that would be useful for community members. Such content that already exists within the community can be identified and indexed, or we can work with the community to fill that gap by creating new content.

Using Community Help

Community Help search is easy to find. Most Creative Suite 4 products have the in-product search field. You can type your query in the product and launch a custom search. You can launch custom search from the search field inside any CS4 product help page. (If you’re working offline, for most products you will be able to use local help search.) If you’re already on Adobe.com, you can use the search field on any product Learning and Support web page. When your search results appear, you can refine your search in several ways, such as focusing on a different product, a specific reference guide, or perhaps just Adobe.com content.

Choosing Help from your CS4 product Help menu takes you directly to an online product Learning and Support Center—your hub for community-based instruction, inspiration, and support. You can also browse to product centers on Adobe.com.

Each product has its own Learning and Support Center with access to the following:

• Product online help, technical support, and customer service.
• Getting Started—what you need to start using your new CS4 product, whether you’re a new user or just want to learn new features. Includes the new Learn CS4 programs on Adobe TV with getting started, new features, and suite workflow video tutorials for every product in the suites.
• Troubleshooting—top technical support notes.
• Editors’ picks—tutorials, articles, videos, samples, and galleries.
• Community—forums, blogs, and events.
• Community Help custom search.

We’re very excited about Community Help and committed to ongoing improvements and additions. Please let us know what you think—what works and what we can improve. Community Help is online, so we will update it regularly—not only with new content but also with new features that community member’s request.