Here are the details:
- Where: Adobe’s San Francisco office for local participants or via phone/internet for remote participants
- Duration: 1.5 hours
- Format: 1:1 interviews with our researcher
- If selected to participate, you will receive a $100 gift certificate for Amazon as a token of our appreciation.

If you are interested in participating, please click this link and fill out our screener: http://www.adobe.com/go/hsscreener.
If you are selected, we will contact you by phone or email.

Thank you for your interest!
Adobe User Research

The first thing you will notice when you login to the Share Beta service is the new button bar at the top.

We have eliminated the Home tab which was in the previous version of the service to give more focus to your documents in the Share library. The three buttons are the primary tasks supported by the Share service: Uploading files, Sharing files and Converting Files to PDFs. Yes, creating PDFs!ﾠ

Now you can convert documents to Adobe PDF using Share! Adobe PDF is the de facto standard for more secure, dependable electronic information exchange — recognized by industries and governments around the world. By converting your files to Adobe PDF you can ensure that recipients will be able to view your files regardless of platform and application availability. To convert a file to PDF simply select the file from your desktop or by dragging-and-dropping a file already in your Share library.

Once the PDF conversion is completed you can directly Share the converted file or copy the URL or copy the embed code for the file. Share supports converting to PDF all the popular formats including: Microsoft Office files, Open Office files, text files, images and postscript files.

Based on user feedback we have also added an Upload Files task which allows you to simply pick one or more files from your desktop and upload them to Share.

You can use this task to store a file on Share and then share it with others either by emailing the URL directly or embedding the file on your website, blog or a wiki page using the embed code. Share automatically generates a thumbnail and a Flash preview for all stored files to provide a rich browser-based viewing experience for your files. With this new release, in addition to PDF and image files (which were already supported in the earlier version), you will be able to view Microsoft Office files, Open Office files through the web browser without having to first download them.

The Share Files task should look familiar but has a couple of interesting enhancements.

We have added the ability to customize the subject of the Share emails when notifying recipients regarding shared files. When choosing recipients for sharing files, the system will match against your contact list as you type and auto-complete the email addresses for you making it easier to share files.

This new release of Share enhances the ability to embed documents into external website by enabling embedding of Office documents. The embedded view also contains a full screen toggle which allows users to view the embedded document in the full screen mode and provides a much richer viewing experience.

One additional feature worth mentioning, search now searches through the contents of your entire file library including files that other have shared with you so that you can quickly find the file you are looking for.

ﾠ

Let us know what you think about this new release and please send us feedback about other enhancements you would like to see in Share at share_beta at adobe.com.

We are looking for people to participate in a user research study on Thursday, December 6 and Monday, December 10 at our facilities in San Jose.

The study will take approximately 1 hour, and compensation will be $100.

Thank you!

Enjoy Share and continue to give us your feedback about the service.

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What a beautiful waterfall!!

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In addition we are also adding a full page toggle mode for the embedded previewer and other UI controls like zoom-in and scroll based on your feedback. These are particularly important when reading embedded documents.

A couple of features that the team is working on are:

• Adding the ability to convert documents to PDF (including Microsoft Office files, ODF, etc.)
• Easily searching and finding documents using the document properties and content.

More on these and additional features later…

Enjoy Share..

This is really exciting and highlights the extensibility of the service. Shahram was able to take the vanilla Share APIs and build a prototype using these APIs in a just a couple of days. This is exactly the types of scenarios we have envisioned in opening up the service for use by developers and third parties service providers.

For those who missed the keynote presentation at MAX below are the slides, shared using the Share beta service…off course.

For those interested in using Share REST APIs and building your own apps, there is a lot of really good information on the Adobe Labs and the Collaborative Methods blogs.

By way of introductions, we are a team at Adobe tasked with building solutions to simplify document collaboration. We are pretty excited to announce the beta of our service for sharing, managing and organizing your important document; internally codenamed “Share”. You can check out the service at http://share.adobe.com. In the next weeks and months we will be sharing a lot more with you.

If you are attending MAX 2007 in Chicago, come watch the demo of the Share beta service during Kevin Lynch’s keynote on day 2 of MAX (Chicago, October 2, 10:30AM-12:00PM Central). Other sessions you might be interested in to learn more about our plans:

Collaborative Hosted Services Roadmap
        Monday, October 1, 3:15 pm – 4:15 pm Erik Larson

Adobe Hosted Services: Web APIs and Mashups
        Monday, October 1, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm Patrick Rodriguez, Nigel Pegg
        Tuesday, October 2, 2:45 pm – 3:45 pm Patrick Rodriguez, Nigel Pegg