I agree... and repeat... I committed to the Adobe ebook server, made purchases of books, got my design company to hold an ebook conference for book publishers. Then suddenly Adobe pulled the plug on serving ebooks-- and made no provision for customers' purchase of commercial ebooks. The ebooks were just gone, no refund, no books made available on another server-- Adobe just said we are not serving the ebooks you purchased. Tough luck. Adobe therefore has, from my point of view, a history of making commitments to extended business segments and then dropping those businesses without concern for the cost or purchases made by customers. Because of my previous poor experience with Adobe in the server busines, I would never rely on Adobe serving critical data again. I will use and teach Adobe tools, but I won't make the wealth and health of my business dependant upon Adobe where servers are involved.

Incontext editing is/was a tool, a web service, that was in line with Adobe's core business. I would have used that tool even if I had to pay for it-- as was proposed from the beginning. Business Catalyst is not in line with Adobe's core business. I see it as the ebook server business, an experiment in a business segment that is well outside their core business. Adobe makes good tools, IMO they should stay there. Adobe is not Google. They need to do what they do best, make exceptional tools. Just because Snap On makes great tools doesn't mean Snap On should say one day, "Hey we've got all these great tools, let's make cars."

Cristenel,

About the hosting again...

As it stands now, I'm your hardest working employee, answering questions about how & why ICE is broken... am I going to have to do that for the server questions too? People wait days months for an answer from Official Adobe staff...

As for the technical support, all those eggs in one basket is a lot  to  swallow. If I have a server issue, I need a solution in minutes not  days.

When the server goes down, do I have to post to a forum and  wait days to hear back?

-Tom

btw... If you don't have an answer, I'll be glad  to post the answer if anyone REALLY wants to know.

It is hard to imagine a website that at some point does not benefit from php or equivalent. This strikes me as a major flaw.

Barry

Christinel,

First, thanks for appearing in here again with more information.

To me, the issue is still very simple. Dreamweaver CS4 was advertised with a 'new feature'. This feature was called inContext. There was no expiration date listed on CS4 and there was no commitment that we have to update to a future version. So, this feature should remain a feature of CS4, as it was advertised.

It looks as though Adobe has cancelled this feature even before the official release of CS5 may happen. I'm still seeing preorder now... So even if Adobe assumed that we would all migrate to CS5 on release date we would still be without a solution now.

Now, maybe it was mentioned somewhere that inContext was a trial or beta version in the fine print. I never found it until I blundered onto this forum because I had to remove the SPF record from our domain so that the email could be sent from Adobe. Well, this is positive proof that Adobe does not understand email. And you are entering the hosting business? This is just one of the thousands of tiny facets of hosting and why we have our on webservers. The 'future' may change this, but the future is not here yet and even if it was, we would not migrate for many years after seeing an established track record. What you have done with Adobe inContext is a huge blemish on that track record already. In fact, doing underhanded things having check boxes set to yes for anti-virus applications and toolbars on the free readers and players is a very negative aspect to me. I'm also not happy that Adobe has apparently choosen to not support CS4 already with repairs, as the answer I got about the broken 'browse to folder' in site manager is that it would not be fixed in CS4.

The Adobe website itself has become as bloated as the 'major software player of the world' webite. Except there, normally you can actually find some information about things and 'trial features' are clearly advertised as such. And you want me to host my clients with you?

I'm still left with researching and finding a new CMS to use and then the replacement of inContext should you choose to continue this path.

The hardship on our business is more than you will ever understand.

Adobe really needs to 'listen' to it's client base. Adobe really needs to keep inContext available to us, your clients. The damage to your name otherwise will be much greater than you can ever know. The damage to your future online package plans will be greater than you will ever know.

I found that inContext was perfect for out client base. Yes, they wanted to do more than it would do, but doing more gave the bulk of them too much power to mess up their website. We needed something that allowed simple text changes with frequency.

Thanks for reading our thoughts.

Thanks for your response, Cristinel. I am glad to hear that Adobe is concerned. As Tommy Logic pointed out, are we to re-write our contact forms and other applications in some other language, not to mention service-side user inpuit checking, database access and so on.

You do offer database access, don't you?

The fact that you even have to ask about the importance of php gives me a very bad feeling that Adobe is developing these products wihout ever having used them, or even talking with anyone who has. Until it is too late.

Barry

.

Soft sell. Hard sell. I'm not sold. No way am I gonna be a beta guinea pig again and subject my clients to Adobe's weird "now you see it now you don't" bad business model, only to lose time and money and credibility due to Adobe. There are good options. I'm going there. I appreciate my clients, and want to take the best care of them possible. Adobe, really, you should take a lesson.

Even with WYSIWYG form creation tools in BC, it will never be a solution for seasoned web developers who need absolute control over code and design. I have my own Tier 4 hosting provider I trust and have used for years without issue: Media Temple. I see the BC environment without PHP, or ability to run any other choice server-side code at all, as a serious hindrance to development... or should I say get happy with no development! Why wouldn't they at least have ColdFusion as a development option? Whatever, BC will never deliver the level of custom design or code control I need to do my job effectively. I'm not saying it wouldn't be beneficial for others, just wouldn't work for I need to do.

There are plenty of other great online CMS solutions to explore (no particular order here):

http://www.konductor.net

http://www.pagelime.com
http://www.cushycms.com
http://surrealcms.com
http://flyspeck.net

http://grabaperch.com
http://www.concrete5.org
http://unify.unitinteractive.com

My personal pick so far (still researching) is Unify as it would allow me the full control to easily install the CMS on my own trusted server in just a few minutes, no database required, no limits on upload storage, and I never have to worry about a middle-man-CMS-hoster having technical issues, server outages, or that may one day sell the product off to someone else, stop development, or go out of business. I'm after more control for myself and my Clients and less unecessary cloud control from third party hosting just for a CMS... learned my lesson from InContext.

by the way... Dreamhost was Originally a group of young students that collaborated via the interweb back in the day.. they were a young group of hippies in California that were making websites as a group from distant location (pretty much my business model).. they got into hosting when they had realized how these big companies were screwing the little guy... (if that soundas familiar) ... so they took all the "cool" features and offered them at really low prices and bought their first server...

Here's there story (much like mine & much like PageLime's)

What a strange, medium-lengthed, trip it's been! I can't believe it's approaching five years since Michael Rodriguez, Dallas Bethune, and I founded New Dream Network while undergraduates at Harvey Mudd College (http://www.hmc.edu/) in Claremont, CA. Before we knew it we had strapping young Freshman Sage Weil in our fold as well. He joined us less than a year later as an equal partner and brought the youthful vigor of an 18 year old to our group (whose average age before his arrival had been a senile 20).

NDN was founded without a business plan and without funding. Although that doesn't mean one doesn't have any money or know what they're doing, in this case we didn't. Basically, the three of us were all pretty fascinated with the world wide web, and had each separately picked up a very small design clientele. We thought, "Wouldn't it be fun to join together, pool our resources and our clients, and play company?" It sure would be! Soon we had business cards and post-it notes to rival any of the Fortune 500 companies.

From these 3 clients we raked in big bucks. Being forward-looking young studs, we plowed all our proceeds (about $1000) back into the company. That was just enough to purchase destro, a Pentium 100 minitower on which we installed this free server operating system called Linux which was just starting to get stable enough to use on production machines such as ours. The network infrastructure was provided by one of Dallas' friend who worked in an office with an unsaturated T1 line. Destro sat unnoticed under the friend's desk for a time.

So at this point we had a little bit of a plan and a little bit of money. Well, no money still, but a server all paid for at least. Our plan was to become an internet design company! What a clever plan! But we did have a little bit of a new twist, you've got to give us some credit. The twist was that we would create a network of independent designers (like we were!) who would share resources with each other. If you were too overwhelmed with work to take on a new client, you could refer them to us (the New Dream NETWORK see?) and we'd find somebody else who wanted to do it. We'd maybe take a 10% cut or something ourselves, and also get our own design clients that way too. Early on we added a bunch of "members" as we called them to our network, plenty of whom are still with us and are either our friends or employees (or both?).

But it was hard making money on design! Especially for these piddling clients we had! We needed the big clients! We needed the Baker Tanks and Gulfstreams of the world! Unfortunately, when you're a small group of full-time Computer Science majors in college, you just don't get these sorts of clients. Which is why it was a good thing web hosting sort of fell into our lap. See those first three clients needed a server to host their web sites on after we designed them. But there weren't really any big name hosting outfits back then, and we'd just dropped a fat wad on that shiny new server. Heck, WE were computer scientists, hosting people's websites should be cake! In fact, it was (relative to designing sites), and best of all, they paid you EVERY SINGLE MONTH whether you did any work or not. Suffice to say we dropped the design thing pretty darn fast.

But again, we weren't hosting the McDonald's or Sheratons. We were hosting the puncture.coms and nagc.coms. And in order to build a company hosting the little folks, you need to have a lot of them. But the big question was, "How do we get the word out about our hosting services?" We kinda got lucky with that too. There never really was a marketing plan at all. We got a lot of our hosting through referrals from those members I talked about before, especially through swanky.org, which we hosted for free for a while. It was this swanky design site thing I never really understood. But it got us a fair amount of publicity! Nothing compared to the support we got from Sage and his Webring though.

Webring was something Sage Weil (our fourth partner, remember?) thunk up and started while in High School, before coming to Mudd. It was a pretty cool thing where people could create a virtual "ring" of related sites that all link to each other, and the webmasters didn't need to update their HTML when a new site was added to the ring. It was and still is really popular and grew to have hundreds of thousands of rings and millions of sites. Sage was barely supporting it with advertising revenue, and we were helping him maintain it and design it and the like. We put ads for our hosting and links to New Dream Network on it which helped build our traffic.

During that time Sage wrote another web-based system called Dreambook, a free web-based guestbook service which we also linked to from Webring. Now it's got about 500,000 members, and we mostly show ads for our hosting service on it as well. Later, Sage sold Webring to Starseed which was bought by Geocities who was soon aquired by Yahoo. But fortunately we already had a steady flow of traffic and Sage got a steady flow of income.

Well I'm getting a little lost here with the time frame of all this, but I know that in September of 1997 is when we named our hosting service DreamHost (ala Dreambook and New Dream Network) and really started getting serious about it. That summer I was actually in Taiwan learning Chinese and handling tech support from the Language Institute's Computer Lab or the Train Station which had a free Internet Demo set up during the seven weeks I was there. When I graduated in May of 1998 we had just enough income from DreamHost to pay me to work full time on the company. Dallas had been working for a year at iXL because when he graduated in 1997 we couldn't no how afford to pay for his extravagent lifestyle of Del Taco at least three times a week. Michael and Sage were still in school.

Near the end of 1998 we had enough money from hosting for Dallas to quit his job, and in December 1998 we hired our first employee, Andrew. He was a member and he worked remotely from Canada. Not too much later we hired another member, Jeff, who worked remotely from Washington State. Things were getting a little bit too far strung though (I had moved to St. Louis myself because my girlfriend was a senior at Wash U.) and so we started looking for some actual physical office space of our own in the Spring of 1999.

Dallas found a place in Huntington Park, a suburb in East L.A. that was 14,000 square feet for only $1800/month. In the summer of 1999, when our first big hiring spree began (about when Yahoo bought Geocities), we all lived there and it was a pretty crazy place. If you want to see the building, just rent  She's Out of Control (unless you own it) with Tony Danza. Our building is the radio station he works at in the movie. In fact, the stairs still have the piano key carpet from the movie on them!

Nowadays we've got 32 employees (not counting the four honchos) and only Dallas and Jason still live in the building. That's pretty respectable, only two people actually living in the office! We've even got another office in Boston now, with two employees and myself. (I moved to Boston in the fall of 1999 when my girlfriend went to grad school here). Our big money maker is still DreamHost, which now boasts over 10,000 active hosting customers, but we're branching out into a bunch of other stuff. See, despite how easily we took to web hosting, and despite never really having a plan for NDN, we always imagined ourselves as more than just another web host. That's why we're adding things like dedicated servers (dreamservers.com!) and domain registration! But really, that's pretty much web-hosting too. Which is why we're starting other cool non-web-host things like vibeflow.com and design-l.newdream.net, to get back to our artsy roots. There's plenty more to come from us, you wait and see. And if you don't wait and see, I promise you'll miss it. And it will be something you've missed by not waiting.

-Josh Jones

I appreciate all of the honest opinions and knowledeable contributions here. BC just looks like more than I want or need from a CMS/web software service-- I think I hear others saying the same in most cases. The cost is probably number one why I would not go with BC; control is number 2; reliability of a network who just purchased their servers and set up their business is number 3.

I host 100 sites with Network Solutions, each one costs me less than $10 a year. The Internet is their core business. As far as I can see, NS is 100% up time, they have real people who answer the phone, and I get immediate responses to questions and problems. If a client wants more features I can add-on through NS. I control the virtual server, can use CGIs and PHP, set individually for accounts. I just liked the simplicity of ICE as a front-end tool for the client. It was lovely and a largely intuitive tool. I liked that it was linked to Dreamweaver, but I don't mind pasting a little code-- and PageLime looks to me like just the ticket.

I am no coder, but I am also no dummy. I can manage a Plesk control panel and a Virtuozzo server reset. But I am primarily an artist and long-time consumer of Adobe products. I wonder if Adobe's market research on this roll out was flawed. I think I am exactly who they think wants this product-- and it is all wrong for exactly me.

I saw something that looked setting up and trying a site ( not sure if 

more than one is possible ) but it appeared there was a short time 

limit on it.  The inference being you spend time building and then 

costs kick in.  And it was not clear the costs would be small.

Did I miss something like the InContext situation where you could set 

up and run on an ongoing basis?

BTW - I have CS4 Master Collection.  Does BC push me toward a need for 

CS5?

Bob

Sent from my iPhone

I will explore it and BC as time permits.  It seems I have less time and mind share available when I am looking for a job than when I am actually employed.  I need to triage where my time goes, and as it happens I don't have to find any web hosting/technology solutions right at the moment.  I am keeping my eyes open for opportunities that look like they would could offer sufficiently interesting improvements to justify the time commitment to explore them.  There are lots more opportunities out there than there is time and energy to fully explore.  Been there and been doing it for forty years...

That is one reason for posting at Adobe - trying to get them to better understand where people like me come from - our needs - in hopes they will address my kind of needs better and look like better prospects for me to consider.

I will be avoiding BC like the plague. I've already been burned  (a lot of $ and time) by Adobe's disregard of my business and my clients. I won't make that mistake again. There are some really good and easy to implement alternatives (many listed here on the forum).

"One thing I want to emphasize is the fact the InContext Editing service  is going to remain operational until early 2011 for already registered  websites. Those sites will keep all the functionality, including adding  users and will give everyone a lead time to select the best solution for  their needs."

That means absolutely nothing to me. To EVER have to pay for ICE is unconscionable. I bought the software, and nowhere on the package did it say I would ever have to pay for it.

-Mike

I think Apple might put a little different spin on the Flash picture.

Note that Flash not working on iPhone has been around since the beginning.  Nothing new at all.  There has never to my knowledge been a commitment that it would be supported at any particular point - again, just hopes and futures.

I think of Flash in two contexts.  One is as a popular tool for serving video.  The other is as a general tool for flashy, dynamic user experiences that was designed to get around the limitations of what could be done with HTML.

The flashy pages have long been deprecated by a lot of people.  That is (was) based on considerations like esthetics, bandwidth, and performance more than the particular tool that brought it to us.  (Flash enabled new levels of bad taste, so to speak)

On the video side, my understanding is that the iPhone insides are rather carefully designed to squeeze out sufficient performance to play specific video encodings and sizes.  I have the impression there is dedicated hardware in it to do that task, and it is done in a very specific way that perhaps Flash does not interface with.  Also, generally I understand that Apple at least says things along the lines that Flash presents vulnerabilities and/or attack vectors that are unacceptable for the user experience they want to deliver.  I suspect there is a significant hardware and memory issue too.  It appears Apple and Adobe simply can not get together on the subject.  It may also be that some of that is about being able to limit App distribution to the iTunes channel.  Those limitations may not be desirable, but it certainly seems to have been exceedingly successful.

The big factor now is that HTML5 is providing native support for video and at least some level of other dynamic graphics.  It is not all the way there yet, but it is developing into a much better, much more standard paradigm for those purposes, and as such it is looking like it will be displacing more and more Flash use.  With the addition of the iPad to the mix site designers are either going to have to use HTML5 instead of Flash, or provide two versions, or have more and more of their audience unable to see their sites.  When I serf to a site on an iPhone or an iPad and find that little icon instead of the main content, I now ask myself how much the site owners care about reaching their audience, and of course they fail to communicate with me and waste my visit.  Is it something like 85 million iPhones surfing the web?  And now something like half a million iPads added in just the first week?  How long can site owners afford to not change their site designs to work were there is no Flash support?

Bob

wow, big time talking points.

kudos to your attorneys, and pr firm.

but nfw I'm buying into BC

Terms of use... MY ***, CS5 no longer will support INcontext Editing.... it's a joke right? The only reason I purchased Dreamweaver CS4 was for Incontext Editing. Perhaps a class action law suit is in order. Adobe you are a bunch of bullies and NO you MAY NOT take my clients into your so called " Adobe Business Catalyst", why should I give them to you for hosting fees, GET REAL! Adobe, you are nothing but a joke, agreedy joke. I want my money back for Dreamweaver CS4!!!!!!!!

I've gone over to PageLime for the non-techies and Wordpress for clients who are interested in playing around and adding a blog, if they want to.

I might update the Dreamweaver element of CS4, but certainly not the rest - and shall be treating Adobe's offerings with a good deal more caution in the future.

I tried PageLime's free 3 sites for my clients. They liked it, and it was easy and fast to  implement. So I went for the $19.95/month for 50 sites. It doesn't work for every site, though. I had one site (that I didn't create, but updated) that was done on a weird format template. Doesn't work for that. Otherwise, I'm happy.

Hey Smash... I never did see that you finally signed up for the Pro plan. If you're having problems with a site, let me know what it is & I'll try to fish it out for ya.

I can't get it through to enough people.. PageLime is the simplest system, you're gonna come across, yet its so powerful... I don't understand why everyone isn't just jumping right on it. It will ahndle just about any SSI page or flat site you can throw at it.. and if it doesn't, let them know and it will !!!

If your not onboard yet.. check out their Demo Video @ PageLime

smasheasy wrote:

 

I tried PageLime's free 3 sites for my clients. They liked it, and it was easy and fast to  implement. So I went for the $19.95/month for 50 sites. It doesn't work for every site, though. I had one site (that I didn't create, but updated) that was done on a weird format template. Doesn't work for that. Otherwise, I'm happy.

-Tom