Adobe Education Technologies

Growth pains, we all have experienced them personally from time to time. Growth pains are also true for companies and Adobe Systems is no different. If you've called upon Adobe for EDU tech/customer support over the last few months you may have been put on hold for a while or even worse experienced being left to figure out on your own what to do to come up with a solution to an issue you may be having with a Adobe product or service.

This of course is extremely frustrating and just like you I can't stand it when this happens to me. That's why if you have had any issues with Adobe customer support lately I'd like to sincerely apologize to you on behalf of Adobe Systems.

So what's up with Adobe support and the lackluster help you may have experienced from us?

Bottom line is Adobe is transitioning to a new global support provider. While our new service provider will improve our EDU customer service worldwide, the transition taking place right now to our new global provider has not gone as smoothly as we had anticipated.

Lambert Walsh, our VP of Technical Services spoke for Adobe on this subject recently: "Adobe is committed to providing the most advanced, innovative products and services in the world. Recently, however, our customers have experienced a level of service that is inconsistent with what they expect and deserve. This is unacceptable and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused. We are working diligently to resolve these issues."

Mr. Walsh has even written an Open Letter to Adobe Customers about our customer support and the transition to our new service provider. I encourage you to please give Mr. Walsh's letter a read so you know firsthand that we are in fact addressing these issues and are getting back on track with stellar customer support as quickly as possible (link below).

Thank you for understating and again I apologize if you've had any poor customer support from us recently.

Sincerely,

Richard John Jenkins

Open Letter to Adobe Customers (PDF, 424 K) from Mr. Lambert Walsh, VP, Technical Services

Adobe Support Site:

http://www.adobe.com/support/

Posted by Richard John Jenkins at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Greetings all,

Last week Adobe Systems Inc. hosted the Adobe Educator Summit 2009 at the highly respected and ideally located Santa Fe Photographic Workshops (SFPW) in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

We invited 25 top photographic educators from the US and Canada to participate in a 7 day Lightroom and Photoshop boot-camp that covered learning and integrating both Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 into the education environment.

Training was run by Julieanne Kost, with presentations by Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty, who also discussed & answered technical issues and feature requests. Bob Rose, also provided major assistance. Special thanks to Bill Gratton (National Manager of Educational Markets for the MAC Group and Leaf America) for providing the teachers with Leaf digital backs and Profoto lights to use during the week.

Eric Scouten (LR Eng.) and I assisted the educators during the training. Eric took numerous notes that he posted internally so that the entire Lightroom team could be aware of the needs of the attending educators. I was amazed and impressed with how quickly the LR team responded to Eric's comments. This is a team that "gets it".

We even got to photograph at the famous Eaves Movie Ranch and Tent Rocks...check out the photos below!

Movie slideshow of the photographs taken by the attending educators:
http://santafeworkshops.com/FridayShow/b3d7g6.html

*Note: for the slideshows below, please make sure that your browser isn't stretching out the images. If so, just resize your browser down so that the photos don't show up pixellated...

Captivate slideshow of some of the week's events (including Eaves Movie Ranch):
santaFe_2009.swf

Captivate slideshow from Tent Rocks:
santaFe2_2009.swf

Some photos that I took...

Cheers!
Rick Miller

Posted by Rick Miller at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two years ago at an education conference I met way cool Dave Forrester, a school counselor at Olympia High School in Olympia, Washington. After the conference ended Dave and I decided to stay in touch. Dave handed me a thumb drive just before we departed and said it contained his "Connect Card," his virtual business card that had all his contact information on it and more. Now I had never heard of a Connect Card but when Dave informed me it was created with our very own Presenter 7 software I was eager to check it out.

After arriving back at my home office I fired up Dave's Card. I was so impressed by what Dave had created with our Presenter 7 tools I decided to create my very own too. In fact now in every outbound Outlook email I send to educators there is a link to my Connect Card so K12 educators that I work with can easily get in touch with me and learn all about Adobe in K12 education.

Just so you know, Presenter 7 is not a stand along software tool like for example, Photoshop; it's a plug-in for Microsoft's Power Point and works in conjunction with Power Point's slides. It's perfect for making presentations, eLearning content and has a wonderful and easy to use quiz creation tool set that communicates with popular LMS (learning management systems).

Since I created my Connect Card I've been contacted by dozens of educators (even Adobe coworkers) asking me to show them how to create one. I decided the best way to do this was to create a series of online demos using our terrific Captivate CS4 tool to show & tell you all how to make one.

Below are five separate demo movies on how to create your own Connect Card, plus a few eductor's cards (including Daves) that are complete.

Please note, these are big movies with sound, meaning they are large files and wil take some time to load into your browser for viewing - go get a Starbuck's coffee and come back tommorow to see them (just kidding! It only takes minutes).

Connect Card Demonstration Movies: Total running time - 28:30

How to Create a Connect Card Part 1 (4:20)

How to Create a Connect Card Part 2 (8:30)

How to Create a Connect Card Part 2-B (4:30)

How to Create a Connect Card Part 3 (4:45)

How to Create a Connect Card Part 3-B (6:30)

Judy Durkin's Connect Card

Dave Forrester's Connect Card

Richard John Jenkins' Connect Card

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about making a Connect Card, or our Presenter 7 or Captivate CS4 tools.

Richard

Posted by Richard John Jenkins at 1:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe Digital School Collection,ADSC,Silent Installation,Enterprise Deployment

K-12 school districts across the United States and internationally are embracing the Adobe Digital School Collection as their solution for providing students with a foundational set of digital communication skills for the 21st century workplace. Many of these deployments can require installing the five included applications across hundreds, even thousands of machines. The Adobe Education Technologies blog has compiled a list of helpful resources for school IT personnel:

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro:

• Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Enterprise Deployment Resources
  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/enterprise_deployment.html
• Adobe Customization Wizard 9 Documentation
  http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/pdfs/cust_wizard9_datasheet.pdf
• Adobe Customization Wizard 9 Download
  http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3993

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7:

• Silent Install Instructions for Photoshop Elements 7 (AOO volume license version on Windows)
  http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/406/kb406822.html

Adobe Premiere Elements 7:

• Silent Install Instructions for Photoshop Elements 7 (AOO volume license version on Windows)
  http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/406/kb406822.html

Adobe Soundbooth CS4 & Adobe Contribute CS4:

• Adobe CS4 Enterprise Deployment Toolkit
  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/creativesuite/
• Additional Adobe CS4 Deployment Resources
  http://blogs.adobe.com/edtechatadobe/adobe_software/creative_suite/

 

Happy Installing!

Posted by Patrick Koster at 2:23 PM | Permalink