Under-Appreciated Collaboration Options for Adobe Creative Suite 4

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Adobe products are well known to anyone involved in graphic design, publishing, video production and Web design. Adobe began to bundle a number of its applications in a package it called the Creative Suite in 2003. Adobe released the fourth incarnation, Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4), in October 2008. What follows are some of the collaborative options available for Adobe’s latest offerings that can significantly improve productivity, which I think are often under-appreciated. I will focus on options for collaborating with Acrobat with Acrobat.com, InDesign with InCopy, and Dreamweaver with Contribute.

The packaging options for the Creative Suite are complex—there are six different editions containing varying collections of 16 different Adobe products each targeted at a specific demographic. The list of titles included in the various editions of Creative Suite are: Acrobat 9 Pro, After Effects CS4, Bridge CS4, Device Central CS4, Contribute CS4, Dreamweaver CS4, Dynamic Link, Encore CS4, Fireworks CS4, Flash CS4 Professional, Illustrator CS4, InDesign CS4, OnLocation CS4, Photoshop CS4, Photoshop CS4 Extended, Premiere Pro CS4, Soundbooth CS4, and Version Cue CS4. The Creative Suite editions range from $1800 to $2500 (USD) and offer substantial savings over buying multiple applications individually.

Adobe Acrobat has gradually increased its options for collaboration. With Acrobat Pro 9 included in CS4 there are a number of distinct options for collaboration including Buzzword, Collaborate Live/Live Enable, ConnectNow, and Shared-Review. In 2008, Adobe merged several of its Web-based offerings into the Acrobat.com service that includes: Buzzword, ConnectNow, Create PDF, and Share products. These Web-based tools largely complement the applications in the Creative Suite. Each Acrobat.com account comes with 5GB of space that can be used for storing and sharing documents. Presumably to limit problems with sharing unauthorized copyrighted material, Adobe prohibits the storage of most common audio, video, and font files.

Adobe Buzzword is a Flash-based online collaborative word processor that provides a simple way for multiple authors to collaborate on documents. The application will import most common office documents. Users are presented with a browser-based WYSIWYG word processor that is well-designed and straightforward for use by individuals or small groups. Buzzword supports three permission-based roles for collaboration: authors, reader, and reviewer. Authors have full editing ability for the documents, reviews may only add comments, and readers may only view the document.

Adobe ConnectNow is a secure hosted Web conferencing and collaboration service for up to three people—a host and two participants. ConnectNow is part of the Acrobat Connect family formerly known as Macromedia Breeze. ConnectNow offers the ability to share screens, text chat, reservationless audio conferencing, and videoconference during the session. In addition to screen sharing, ConnectNow offers a shared whiteboard with markup and annotation features. One person can remotely control another person’s keyboard and mouse while screen sharing for technical support situations. Adobe offers Acrobat Connect and Acrobat Connect Pro for larger meetings and training sessions.

Adobe Create PDF allows users to convert five documents up to 200MB each into PDFs. The service will accept most common word processor, office documents, Web pages, and graphic files for conversion. If the uploaded document is a scan, Create PDF will automatically optical character recognition (OCR) up to 50 pages of the document so that the final PDF is searchable. Create PDF is essentially a trial version of Adobe’s paid service called Create Adobe PDF Online which allows for unlimited conversions, prioritized conversions, and 100 pages per file for OCR. This service offers similar functionality to Acrobat’s print to PDF feature. Adobe’s online PDF conversion service can be useful for turning less common document formats into PDFs without having the original application.

Adobe Share and My Files are the services that make the 5GB of storage on Acrobat.com valuable. Each document stored is accessible by a unique URL. Documents can be stored solely for individual use, restricted to specific Acrobat.com account holders, or made publicly available. Previews of documents stored on Acrobat.com may be embedded in other Web pages. Adobe Share and My Files would instantly become far more valuable if Adobe provided a simple interface for all Creative Suite applications to store documents on Acrobat.com. Adobe Share provides the ability to collaboratively view PDF documents that is largely hidden within the interface. When a host selects Live Enable PDF from the document submenu. Invited participants with Acrobat 9 or Acrobat Reader 9 will be able to automatically match the host’s page and magnification area. A text chat session is also enabled for Live Enabled documents. The same feature called Collaborate Live is available directly from within the Acrobat application.

Adobe Acrobat is the industry standard application for creating and editing PDF documents. Several improvements for Acrobat 9 includes improvements to the Shared Review functionality and hooks to the Acrobat.com storage in addition to WebDAV and Sharepoint network storage to facilitate simplified document sharing. Shared Review allows for similar functionality to Word’s track changes feature. The owner of a document chooses to distribute a PDF via Acrobat.com or another local storage mechanism. Recipients can then annotate the PDFs and upload them back to the server. These annotations unfortunately cannot be shared with Collaborate Live shared documents. Shared review is relatively straightforward to use and is reminiscent of old check in/check out systems. Each participant must contact the server to download annotations from other participants so some users may find it less streamlined than they might like.

Adobe’s desktop publishing product, InDesign, is a standard in the print publishing industry, but does not offer collaborative features by default. The ability to collaborate is essential for streamlining the workflow between editorial and design work. Adobe InCopy is a word processing package that enables individuals to collaboratively write and edit InDesign documents. InCopy is capable of working independently from InDesign, however its strength is its InDesign integration. Writers and editors can use InCopy to work with documents that are laid out by designers in InDesign. InCopy effectively separates the content from the layout. Documents are originally created in InCopy and then linked into the InDesign document. With this mechanism, editorial changes do not require new layout or restyling. Complex documents requiring significant interaction and revisions between editorial and layout can be completed in far less time. For small organizations, this work can occur simultaneously using the bundled Adobe LiveEdit workflows plugins. More complex workflow systems are available for larger organizations via system integrators. InCopy is one of Adobe’s lower profile products as it is not included in any of the CS4 bundles and must be purchased separately ($250 USD). The free Acrobat.com ConnectNow service is integrated with InCopy CS4 and offers a further complement to collaboration between InDesign and InCopy.

Dreamweaver is the leading Web design and development application. Dreamweaver users have a problem similar to InDesign users. Often the end product requires editing by people other than the designers. In particular, most Web sites require regular maintenance to update content. Dreamweaver is powerful, but also complex. It is typically not desirable to have editorial staff editing portions of the document that can affect layout or cause the HTML to become invalid. In addition, depending on the number of individuals that need to be able to make basic editorial changes to a Web site, Dreamweaver licenses can quickly become expensive. Adobe Contribute is a solution to all of these problems. The Web developer can designate specific areas of a page in a Dreamweaver template that are editable. Editorial users with Contribute can then easily modify the Web pages without worrying of causing undesirable design changes to the site. Contribute also facilitates group collaboration and workflow with a locking mechanism to prevent multiple users from overwriting each other’s changes, a shared reviewer tool, and an approval tool. The combination of Dreamweaver and Contribute are included in the Web editions and Master Collection of the Creative Suite bundles. Adobe has an upcoming beta product called InContext Editing that provides functionality similar to the Contribute, but runs entirely in the browser without the need for Contribute. Pricing is unannounced, but the beta is currently free.