Mike Potter

October 24, 2005

Adobe Enterprise Regional User Group - The Day After

OK, well maybe not exactly the day after, but since I was off Friday and then the weekend came and went, we'll call it the next "business day" after. As you may or may not have known, the first Adobe Enterprise Regional User Group meeting was held last Thursday in Chicago. A huge thank you to the Chicago office, especially Holly and Katy, because the event was a huge success. 35 people gathered at the Doubletree hotel and got the inside scoop on Adobe's future plans for LiveCycle 8, info about Adobe support and pro services, first hand impressions of LiveCycle from Praveen Motoru, from CNA Insurance, and a presentation about the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program, by yours truly.

After the "meeting", we all went up to the Adobe office for drinks and food. And really, to be honest, that's when the real meeting started. Great conversation, interesting people, interesting problems. It was a real pleasure to see customers getting answers to their problems while talking to Adobe employees. And, I think if we have to do it next time, that we should try and maximize that time. At the very least, as I said in my presentation, hopefully next time it will be 4 presentations by customers and maybe 1 from Adobe, rather than the other way around.

For the first meeting though, this was a great start. I think most agreed it was a long time coming, and you can bet we'll be working hard to get the next one up and running in the first few months of 2006, along with meetings in other cities throughout the world. (If you want to host one, I want to help you out... I've got money to help with food, drinks and prizes, and can help with speakers etc... Just contact me at dev_info@adobe.com if you're interested in getting together with other users in your area!)

To all the attendees: It was a pleasure meeting you, and hopefully you found the information useful. If you have any comments about the event, please post them to this blog.

This is also a good time to continue to plug the Adobe Developer Days roadshow that is happening in November. 8 cities in 8 days, focusing on Acrobat and LiveCycle. Check out the developer events page for more information.

October 07, 2005

Adobe Developer Day Events

We've got a lot of events coming up in the next few weeks, mostly for enterprise developers. Here's an overview of them.

October 20th - Chicago
The first event that we're hosting is an Adobe Enterprise Solutions regional user group meeting, being held in Chicago (Downer's Grove) on October 20th. The day starts off at 1:00 PM. The meeting is scheduled to go until 5 PM, followed by an open house in the Adobe office until 7 PM or so. The agenda looks something like this: Welcome / introduction by Adobe, followed by the LiveCycle Solutions Roadmap, then a brief discussion on Adobe Professional Services, a presentation by Praveen Motoru of CNA Insurance about their architecture and business strategy, and finishing with a presentation about Adobe support offerings, and a question and answer session. You can attend this free regional user group meeting by registering using this PDF form.

October 25th - Online Webinar
The second event that we have is an online webinar about LiveCycle Workflow and how Java developers can use QPACs and the LiveCycle Workflow component architecture to create workflow applications quickly and easily. Ben Watson, Steve Rotter (product marketing manager for LiveCycle Workflow) and Ashish Agrawal (product manager for LiveCycle Workflow) will be the presenters. The event is a live webcast, scheduled for the 25th of October at 1:00 PM EDT. Again, registration for the event is free and can be done using this form.

November 9th - 22nd - Throughout North America
Finally, the events that I'm most excited about are Adobe Developer Days, coming to a city near you (assuming you live in North America and are located near Seattle, San Jose, Dallas, Boston, New Jersey / New York, Chicago, Ottawa or Toronto) in November. These are full day events, starting at around 9 AM and lasting until 4 PM or so (start and end times may vary per location). In the morning we'll focus on PDF, Acrobat and Reader. We'll cover the PDF file format, the Acrobat SDKs - building plugins for Adobe Acrobat and Reader, JavaScript in Acrobat and Reader, and using WebDAV to store and manage comments from a PDF file. The afternoon will be focused on enterprise developers and the Adobe LiveCycle platform, and will include a discussion on building interactive forms, delivering dynamic forms, enabling editing of PDF documents in Adobe Reader, protecting electronic documents using LiveCycle Policy Server, and putting all the pieces together with LiveCycle Workflow.

You can find the specific dates and locations for these events on our developer events page. They are free to attend and include lunch and refreshments. You can register online for these events using this PDF form.

To answer a few questions we've had so far about these events: we haven't got dates and plans on a European Tour, but we do hope to make it there in 2006. If you live near a city that isn't listed above, there's still hope for you. Contact me at dev_info@adobe.com and we can discuss starting up a user group meeting in your area. If you're interested in starting or attending an Acrobat user group, you should check out acrobatusers.com, which will be the central site for Acrobat user groups.

October 04, 2005

My thoughts on PDF in Office 12

So, Microsoft has decided to include the ability to save directly to PDF in Office 12. Of course when you create an open specification, as Adobe has done with PDF, the odds that creation of that document will become commoditized increase. This is big news for a lot of people, but for some of us, the question to Microsoft is really what took you so long? Anyone can download the freely available specification and build their own PDF creation tool. Wordperfect has it built in, OS X has had it built in since v. 10.0, and a quick search on Sourceforge.net brings up 45 projects for creating a variety PDF documents.

Some people are already saying that this is the end of Acrobat, as PDF creation becomes part of the core office suite. I don’t think so.

In my opinion, people are buying Acrobat for more than just the PDF creation. If you’re a power user, when was the last time you actually just PDFd a document and saved it to your computer. Maybe for a receipt from an online purchase, or some other confirmation, but I think that’s about it. That’s the equivalent of printing out a document just to have a paper record. And if you think about it, there are only a few real advantages to having a PDF document on your own computer compared to having the original file. If you’ve got the program to make the file, you’ve got the program to open the file. Side note: the main exception I’ve found with this is when dealing with HTML pages. I find it much easier to PDF an HTML page, rather than to save the .html file and then a sub-directory of all the images on the page. I prefer to have just one file to send to people.

People really want to share their documents with other people, however I think that most people also want to allow people to view and participate in their workflows. To me, that’s where Acrobat’s real value is. The ability to spin off a review and commenting workflow from directly in Word or Firefox is really the main use that I have for Acrobat these days. People then use Reader or Acrobat to comment in the document, and send it back to me. (Acrobat 7 allows people with the free reader client to participate in your review and commenting workflows). When the document comes back into my inbox, Acrobat merges the comments right back in to the Word document, I accept or reject all the comments, and my workflow is complete.

And if you agree with me that review and commenting is really the main use of Acrobat, then I can’t see how having save to PDF in Office is going to do anything but help Adobe. The first thing people are going to realize is that they can send out this file and everyone is going to be able to open it. That’s the first step, which some of us have known for a long time, but for others (over 30,000 searches for this per week according to Microsoft), this will solve a major problem for them. However, after they’ve found that out, the second step is that people are going to want their coworkers to comment and review on the document. Its just natural. You’ve got a document you want to share with others, and now you can guarantee they can open it. The next thing you’ll want to do is allow people to comment on the document. It’s the logical next step is sharing your documents, and for Office 12 at least, something that people can only do with a copy of Acrobat on their desktop.