Good News for collaboration and version control: Adobe Drive 2 comes to Adobe Labs

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Adobe Version Cue

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Adobe Labs has posted a preview of Adobe Drive 2, its connector to Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems and version control systems.

While it's Windows only for now, it shows that Adobe is committed to DAM and Versioning, despite its decision not to continue development of Version Cue. When CS5 was announced, I got a lot of negative feedback from my customers who depend on Version Cue for project versioning and PDF review management. The killing of VC left them wondering where to turn for version control in the creative space as they transitioned to CS5.

While tools like Subversion and Git are popular in the software development arenas, there aren't integrated solutions for the graphics community to those repositories. Other DAMs and VC platforms exist, but their interfaces are often clunky and require several steps to check parts of a project in and out.

Version Cue provided in-app support for version inspection and reordering, allowing the user to promote a previous version to the current one without losing the current version. This would send a signal to everyone working on the project that the asset had changed, and that they needed to update it. VC also prevented simultaneous editing of graphics (Illustrator and Photoshop) and documents (InDesign and InCopy).

This quiet revelation has me itching to see the released product. I am eager to see whether it will include Git and/or Subversion connectors as well. 

I wonder whether the acquisition of Day Software has anything to do with this.

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6 Comments

For Creative Suite integration with Subversion you can use PixelNovel Timeline (http://pixelnovel.com/timeline). It doesn't work as a Bridge connector, it integrates directly into the host application UI (only Photoshop at the moment, Illustrator and InDesign coming soon).

Adobe Drive 2 conceptually sounds cool. But under the hood using SOAP/XML to encode large binary digital asset is a poor idea from a performance & scalability perspective. In other words, pie in the sky architects came up with Adobe Drive2 and the idea to use SOAP based Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) . This may be some what ok for CMS, where you publish once in a blue moon to a web-site smallish png/html/css files but for the creative workflow during production as many large sized assets are churned (2GB PSd file anyone ?) this strategy totally breaks down. What we need is a versioning system that is designed to scale up for binary assets. Subversion is optimal for text files used in software development. In my search for a version control system the best of the breed I have found is Evolphin Zoom or Perforce . Zoom is designed for the artists while Perforce has a very 90s UI feel to it and is also optimized for software development. Zoom is the only solution out of the box that supports all the Adobe CS Apps - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks etc

James:

Great article on Adobe Drive. I was wondering if you could give me some advice. I have a client who publishes student text books in Spanish. They're looking to create an editorial workflow with a very limited budget. Woodwing, K4 and other publishing systems are out of the question at this time. So, I've suggested using Adobe Drive 2 for a short term solution.

Where this gets complicated is that they have editorial teams in two different locations. They are paying a bunch of money to setup a system where both teams can work together by having two servers (one at each location) mirroring the data. According to the IT guys the server would show up to both teams on their own network with the same name. And, I'm starting to wonder if Adobe Drive installed on one of the servers would really work. They tell me they'll use NetApp for replication and Microsoft DFS for something along the lines of hiding the server name or something to that extent. Do you have any thoughts on this that you can share? I would really appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Best Regards,
Jose

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This page contains a single entry by James Lockman published on August 13, 2010 12:55 PM.

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