Code Name Genesis - The Future of the Enterprise Desktop

Tomorrow morning I am flying to Aspen to participate in the first Enterprise UI Summit. The Summit is organized by Jive Software and brings together an interesting mix of enterprise software practitioners and UI designers from companies like SAP, Google and Adobe. In preparation for the summit I answered a couple of questions which Jive CMO Sam Lawrence emailed me the other day. You can find the discussion here. His blog has also the profiles of other participants which are worthwhile to read if you are interested in UI design for enterprise applications.
I am certainly proud of the Genesis UI design and excited to show it to some other experts in the field and get feedback.

Posted by Matthias Zeller at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chris Kanaracus, a Correspondent for IDG News Service, is the first to publish an article about Genesis. I guess Chris stumbled across this Blog and found it interesting enough for an article. The article is accurate and I especially like the quotes:

Bob Gourley, former CTO of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, has been using Adobe's Connect and Acrobat.com collaboration offerings for his consulting business. Those tools and the workspaces concept in Genesis collectively generate "a really disruptive capability," he said in an e-mail.

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink, largely echoed Gourley. "If there's any company that can do the lightweight enterprise mashup thing credibly, it's Adobe," he wrote in an e-mail.

By the way we have still a few slots available to meet and discuss Genesis during our roadshow in Austin next week (7/16 - 18) and in Chicago next month (8/12 - 14).

Posted by Matthias Zeller at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

During the next months we will conduct a couple of roadshows as part of our effort to get early feedback from potential Genesis (code name) users. We plan to visit three regions in the United States: Dallas/Austin, Seattle/Portland and Chicago.

We are specifically interested to talk with Sales Management, Sales Operations Management, Finance Management (focus on Financial Planning and Analysis) as well as IT professionals in charge of enterprise collaboration. If you are interested or know someone who might be interested to meet with us please contact me at mzeller[at]adobe[dot]com. The Genesis team (there will be about four of us) will visit your company and conduct a 2 hour session to discuss your current usage of business applications and collaboration tools as well as demonstrate the latest version of Genesis and encourage participants to provide feedback into our product roadmap. You also will be first in line to get an invite for the Genesis private beta release we have planned for later this year.

If you are wondering what Genesis is all about see my previous overview post.

Looking forward to hear from you.

Posted by Matthias Zeller at 03:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just finished a new summary description (marketing types call it elevator pitch) for our product initiative code-named Genesis and also took a few new screenshots. Let me know how I could improve the description to make it easy to understand for people without previous knowledge about Genesis.

Genesis is a new product initiative at Adobe with the objective of joining business applications, documents and the web on every knowledge workers desktop with integrated collaboration capabilities. Using the very intuitive interface of the Genesis desktop client (built on Adobe AIR) knowledge workers (like sales and finance professionals) are able to create custom workspaces combining views into business applications, analytics, web sites and documents. Workspaces can be easily and securely shared with other colleagues or business partners outside the company and provide out-of-the-box real time collaboration capabilities like instant messaging, voice and video as well as screen sharing and white boarding. The Genesis desktop client will be provided as a free download (like the Adobe Reader and Flash Player) and the sharing and collaboration infrastructure is provided by Adobe as a hosted service allowing users to adopt Genesis without or only minimal involvement of the IT department.

Pic. 1: A Genesis Workspace - Sales Deal Room includes Salesforce.com opportunity, Pipeline Analysis, Google News and related files and documents (view large screenshot)

Pic. 2: The Genesis Organizer manages all workspaces and provides access to catalogs full of templates and tiles (widgets and applications to customize workspaces) (view large screenshot)

Posted by Matthias Zeller at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In the coming weeks we will conduct a wave of user research for Genesis (code name) in the Bay Area. Our target user groups are finance professionals who need to report company performance to management (FP&A) as well as sales and/or pre-sales professionals who work on complex deals.
If you are interested to provide early feedback on Genesis, influence our roadmap and earn $150 on the side please see the following postings on Craigslist:
Finance Professionals
Sales Professionals

Posted by Matthias Zeller at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)