Posts Tagged “creative”

Adobe has been in the news quite a bit recently, most notably their wimpering/whining about how Apple is being unfair by not including an Adobe technology that is at best only a beta and at worst simply vaporware; namely Flash. Of course, they are also whining about how Apple has disallowed Adobe’s Flash CS5 to create apps for the iPhone. I only mention it because aside from being ridiculous and a little humorous it’s not the first time Adobe has been in the news for something that doesn’t paint them in the best light.

Back in September of 2009 Adobe wrote another Open Letter. But last time it was to their customers regarding their lack of quality support. I was one of those Adobe customers who deserved an apology due to their lack of support with my company’s Version Cue Server issues. And as far as I’m concerned the Open Letter apology was useless and as far as I can tell changed nothing about the quality of their support operations.

As best I can tell when I WAS dealing with Adobe support they had all of 2 people in the company who knew anything about Version Cue Server and I soon discovered that I knew as much if not more about it in most instances. To this day I’m the only one who documented how to configure Version Cue to use SSL. Instead of improving their support and adding more developers to improve what could really be a great source control program for a design group they let Version Cue wither on the vine and just recently announced (if you can call not mentioning something an announcement) that they were no longer shipping Version Cue as of CS5.

I of course have known this for several months as I was invited to be part of some sort of beta program that required an NDA. Turned it out it was a sham and they offered it to me under the guise of letting me help them improve Version Cue and Adobe Drive, but not a single one of my posts in their discussion forums were ever responded to and eventually they confirmed that Version Cue was DOA.

In the end all they accomplished was to shut me up for a while (but I’ll let my daughter take most of the credit for me not having time to write recently) as well as cause me to lose all faith in the company as a whole. All in all not a great plan since I’m in charge of buying/recommending all software in my company with a little less than 100 people. Adobe, I can assure you that I’m buying Adobe alternatives for every possible product and will continue to do so whenever possible.

For those interested in the actual letter, you can read it below. Thanks reader to Chad Jackson for pointing out the link to me. A nice personal touch for Adobe would have been to actually send it to their customers.

Adobe Open Letter

Original Blog Post

I am just about finished testing a Version Cue server replacement at my company. Please check back as I will be detailing the setup and migration process that we take to get rid of Version Cue once and for all.

• Bridge & Adobe Drive Should Display Accurate Info About File Status
• Checked out Files Shouldn’t Disappear from the Server
• More Flexible Permissions on Projects
• Implement Scheduled Server Level Backup

Bridge & Adobe Drive Should Display Accurate Info About File Status

Checked out Files Shouldn’t Disappear from the Server

This occurs most often with Adobe Drive. When you check out a file directly from Adobe Drive, instead of the file information about that file updating to indicate that it is checked out, the file simply disappears from the server. Perhaps it is made invisible or moved to a temporary folder (add that to the long list of Version Cue CS4 mysteries). But when this happens it essentially means that until the file is checked back in there is no record of the file existing unless you open Adobe Bridge. Then you must hope that the file status is up to date as to whether it is checked out or not. Considering that Adobe has rewritten the server and client from the ground up to support Adobe Drive, you would think that they would not force you to open Adobe Bridge to see if a file even exists.

More Flexible Permissions on Projects

This is one of those things that is no different between Version Cue CS4 and CS3, but would be extremely helpful from a security standpoint. As it currently stands right now you cannot set permissions on a per project basis. If you have a group of users you can assign that group permissions but those permissions apply to all projects on the server. In a perfect world, you would be able to set global permissions but also disable inheritance of those permissions on certain projects and assign only specific groups or users to individual projects where necessary. This is just a basic security principle that all enterprises follow.

Implement Scheduled Server Level Backup

It is time to address server level backups in Adobe Version Cue. Currently, it is only possible to do a manual server level back up. While project backups can be scheduled, it is crazy to think that you cannot back up the whole server without manually logging in and clicking the backup button. And to make matters worse, if you do click the backup button, the server becomes unavailable. This means if you try to manually backup your Version Cue server during the day you will prevent all of your users from connecting to the Version Cue server while it is performing the backup. This can actually take quite some time depending on the size of your Version Cue data folder. Even if your design workgroup is not a 24-hour shop, if you’re like us, there is a good chance that designers could be connecting to the Version Cue server at any time. So it makes it impossible to backup the server without potentially affecting staff members trying to get some work done. I don’t know of any other system that disables itself during a backup.

Submit Feedback

As always, I strongly encourage anyone who is interested in getting Adobe to fix the problems with Version Cue CS4 to submit either a feedback requests or a bug report form. They are both accessed from the same link. Select Version Cue from the product list, and if you aren’t sure what to write, copy and paste what I’ve written above. Feel free to submit feedback for every issue as they have told me on more than one occasion that this is the best way to get them to change or fix Version Cue.

If you have questions or comments I’d love to hear them.

Improve reliability to prevent data loss.

Using Version Cue CS4 to manage your files is a lot like gambling. You may win a few hands, but the house always wins. Unlike with gambling, when Version Cue wins it doesn’t take your money, it takes your files and all of your hard work and simply makes them disappear like a Vegas magician.

On average, I need to help someone track down a lost file at least once or twice a week. The only reason it is even that low is because most of our designers have stopped using Version Cue except to check in the final version. When Version Cue eats your file it could be in the local cache folder or it could be somewhere on the server. The frustrating thing is that there is no way to tell without a painstaking manual search.

I spend even more time each week just helping people get connected to Version Cue server using Adobe drive. It is in fact so unreliable that I still can’t figure out how the software ever made it out of beta testing. Reconnecting typically involves deleting the database files stored in the /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CS4ServiceManager/database folder (on the Mac). Most of the time this fixes the problem. But not always. And if you do ever run into this problem be sure to quit the “CS4ServiceManager” process before deleting those files.

Integrate Flash with Version Cue.

There’s not really much to be said here except that Adobe completed the acquisition of Macromedia in April of 2005. Over four years later they still have not managed to integrate flash fully into their products. Really Adobe!!?!!

This happens all too often to companies that have a monopoly position and therefore find it unnecessary to continue to improve their products because, after all, what’s the point if the web and design community have no other option. Adobe keeps raking in the software licensing dollars while businesses and consumers are forced to pay for the “right” to use their software.

Better documentation

This is worth mentioning for the simple fact that Adobe has no idea how Version Cue CS4 really works because they have no internal documentation. To confirm this, all you need to do is call customer support and ask for assistance with Version Cue. They really have no idea how it works. I know this is true because having called in to customer support enough times I’ve discovered several instances where customer service has admitted that certain features are not documented.

It is also evident that their documentation is severely lacking because they were unable to provide me with any documentation for how to install an SSL certificate on the Version Cue CS4 server. I was left to figure it out on my own despite having a paid maintenance/support contract for 20+ licenses of Photoshop. To this day, my documentation for installing an SSL certificate is the only documentation they have on the matter and can be found in the Adobe forum or on the Version Cue help pages. Additionally, while troubleshooting secure connections Adobe Support had me update the “External URL” under the advanced preferences as a workaround. This was an undocumented feature that they “thought” might help.

Submit Feedback

As always, I strongly encourage anyone who is interested in getting Adobe to fix the problems with Version Cue CS4 to submit either a feedback requests or a bug report form. They are both accessed from the same link. Select Version Cue from the product list, and if you aren’t sure what to write, copy and paste what I’ve written above. Feel free to submit feedback for every issue as they have told me on more than one occasion that this is the best way to get them to change or fix Version Cue.

Continuing on with the theme of what is wrong with Adobe Version Cue server CS4 and what Adobe can do to fix it, I will continue my quest to force Adobe to take responsibility for issues with their software. Next up…

3. Checked out files should be easy to find on the local system.

In Version Cue server CS3 a file that was checked out was automatically copied to the local file system in its entirety to a location in the end user’s documents folder. You could always navigate to that documents folder and find every project you were working on and each individual file was available to you with the same name that it had on the server. So if there was ever an issue with the server, your work was safe and easy to find.

In Version Cue server CS4 checked out files are buried in the following location (this one on the Mac) /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CS4ServiceManager/diskcache/ and the files either have a “.info” extension or no extension at all. If the server loses your file (as happens all too often) you’re left trying to figure out which one of those files was the actual file you were working on.  This terrible file organization can be very disconcerting, because it requires putting a lot of faith in a buggy software product. In fact, it is so troubling to our design department that few if any of them actually use Adobe drive to check out files. They work on all files locally instead and check them in to the version control system when they’re done, defeating the entire purpose of version control in the first place. The worst part about this file organization is that you have to add the extension to the actual file just to find out if it is your file or not. That’s not real fun when you don’t even know if it’s a Flash, Photoshop, or Illustrator file so you have to try all those extensions.

4. Bring back synchronization of projects.

Version control systems such as Version Cue CS3 or SVN (and every other version control system I’ve ever seen or heard of) allow you to synchronize content from the server to your local computer. From there, you can work on the file locally and when you are finished you check the file back into the server. For some unknown, and clearly misguided, reason the new Version Cue server forces you to connect to all projects instead of just the project you are working on and requires that you check out individual files directly from the server instead of allowing you to synchronize an entire project (or subfolder) to your local system.

This is especially troubling for flash developers because Flash CS4 does not integrate into Version Cue server (Really? it’s been over 4 years). Instead, it creates all sorts of files on the filesystem and leaves them checked out. Since you can no longer synchronize a folder, you have to manually find each file that has been checked out even if you did not check it out explicitly. The end result is a mess of files that are almost never checked in properly.

I would love for Adobe to explain why they did away with the most basic functionality of a version control system that they had already implemented successfully in Version Cue CS3 server.

Submit Feedback

As always, I strongly encourage anyone who is interested in getting Adobe to fix the problems with version cue CS4 to submit either a feedback requests or a bug report form. They are both accessed from the same link. Select version cue from the product list, and if you aren’t sure what to write, copy and paste what I’ve written above. Feel free to submit feedback for every issue as they have told me on more than one occasion that this is the best way to get them to change or fix version cue.