Opinion: With the launch of the second major release of its Creative Suite, Adobe is driving a new approach to file and workflow management for creative professionals. Can this technology change how creative professionals are managing their work?Launched 18 months ago into an already fairly mature software market, the first release of Adobe's Creative Suite was a runaway success. The integration of all of the different software elements Adobe provides to the design and publishing market into a bigger and better whole was clearly an idea whose time had come.
Although Adobe Systems had to face some confusion in the beginning—yes, Photoshop CS really is version 8.0 of Adobe's flagship product, and InDesign CS is also release 3.0 of the increasingly popular page-layout software—the market seemed to have an instant love affair with the new design environment.
And this was the case despite the fact that release 1 of Adobe Creative Suite (or Adobe CS for short) really offered relatively little in terms of interapplication integration, or at least relatively little benefit you would not have gotten by purchasing individual applications.
In the first iteration of Adobe CS, the only suite-specific piece of engineering was Version Cue, a relatively simple environment for managing and sharing files (and versions thereof) in a creative workgroup.
With version 2 of the Creative Suite, Adobe has placed the bar much higher: Besides providing new releases of each one of the applications included, CS2 moves full steam ahead in workflow integration at the end-user level.
The "pièce de résistance," as it were, is called Adobe Bridge, which gives users an integrated way to access and manage files and Version Cue projects in a variety of ways. Files can be dragged in and out of the Bridge Window, which also allows the viewing of images and metadata in a simple way.
Adobe is touting the value of multipublishing at its CS2 launch. Click here to read more.
In more ways than one, Adobe Bridge is taking the basic ideas of the computer desktop and adding functionality that is geared toward creative professionals, such as a slide-show mode that lets the user quickly sort and rate pictures, or rotate them while viewing the full screen, which should come in handy when going through hundreds of digital photographs.
It will be extremely interesting to see how the market takes to the workflow angle in the creative suite. Helping creative professionals to be more organized in terms of managing the digital work environment is one of the most arduous tasks there is.
My company, Pfeiffer Consulting, has conducted many research projects into creative markets over the years, and while it is clear that professionals would appreciate help with organizing their work and data more efficiently, it is also obvious that every creative professional has his or her little habits and rituals that are an integral part of their management of creative ideas and inspiration.
To put it bluntly: Never tell a creative how to get organized. Will Adobe succeed where most other attempts at workflow technology for creative professionals have failed to garner any significant following?
If there is one company that can pull this off, it should be Adobe: The company is highly trusted by the professional markets it caters to, and trust is essential when trying to persuade users to change their way of working.
Version Cue and particularly Adobe Bridge should gather a strong following on the Windows side of the market: In our research, creative professionals often cite file navigation on Windows computers as complicated and unintuitive compared with the Mac OS X environment.
Adobe Bridge brings some advanced features of Panther and Tiger not yet available on Windows XP, such as the sidebar to store frequently used folders, as well as some smart search options. While the bridge does not compete with Tiger's search technology, Spotlight, users of Creative Suite 2 can define "Collections," folders that are automatically updated following search criteria defined by the user.
To read a review of Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium Edition, click here.
In the end, it will boil down to the users' willingness to learn and adopt new technologies. Adobe Bridge and Version Cue clearly have the potential to introduce more mature file management techniques to the design and publishing market, but professionals will have to accept the learning curve in order to make most of this potential.
Will it happen? It just might: We are talking about a marketplace that is particularly sensitive to innovation, especially when it comes at the right time. The strong response to the initial release of the Creative Suite showed that Adobe had hit a nerve; we will see how creative professionals take up Adobe Bridge and Version Cue CS2.
Andreas Pfeiffer is founder of The Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.
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