Adobe Community: Adobe Drive roadmap

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Adobe Drive roadmap

Sep 21, 2010 1:48 AM

I understand that CMIS will be used as standard connector to exchange data between DAM-systems and Adobe tools like PS, ID, Bridge etc. Is that right? It is a very promising approach and i would love to see it become a fully supported core technology within the Adobe product range. It also seems to make a lot of sense, considering that the purchase of Day Software brought powerful DAM technology with full CMIS support to Adobe.

At the time being the CMIS-connector is still lacking so important things like previews, metadata and alike. Is there some kind of roadmap available for Adobe Drive?

Any infos would be very appreciated.

Thomas

2582 Views 20 Replies Latest reply: Lee Hui, Feb 15, 2011 11:48 PM

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1. KenToole,

Sep 27, 2010 9:07 AM in reply to ThomasL.

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Thanks for the validatoin of this direction. Currently we have the Adobe Drive CMIS connector in pre-release on
labs for the express purpose on maturing its functionality and getting feedback regarding what the most critical features are to support and to give some time for additional vendors to provide CMIS interfaces and test the Adobe Drive connector against those.

In terms of roadmap we intend to make the CMIS connector in final form available to Creative Suite customers in our next update of Adobe Drive sometime later this year. After that we will continue to participate in the development of the CMIS specification and update Adobe Drive as needed when the specification is updated. In addition we will respond to customer requests through updates to Adobe Drive that will roughly align with major releases of the Creative Suite.

Hope this helps.

Ken

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2. ThomasL.,

Oct 15, 2010 11:50 AM in reply to KenToole

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Ken,

thank your for your promising reply

For now the most relevant things missing from my point of view are:

Searchable Metadata from the DAM-repository in Adobe Bridge (Tags, comments, etc.)
Previews of the supported files in Adobe Bridge
An official commitment of Adobe to help DAM-vendors like Alfresco to develope renditions for Adobe-native file formats.

Thanks again,
Thomas

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3. dmatejka,

Oct 22, 2010 4:45 PM in reply to ThomasL.

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I have to agree,
add metadata extraction and update with advanced search + rating ..and do not forget alfresco renditions and thumbnail creation

We are really looking forward to see DRIVE2 working as we have been trying to implement Alfresco as our DAM, but the combination of CIFS and InDesign was not working at all - crashes of InDesign due to grabage collection in Alfresco (deleting temporary file) - at least we think so because we could not get any response on Alfresco Forum to this problem

I can imagine interesting stuff concerning our workflow make this work..

best regards
Daniel

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4. Zhiqiang Liu,

Oct 25, 2010 5:36 AM in reply to dmatejka

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Hi Daniel,

What do you mean "but the combination of CIFS and InDesign was not working at all - crashes of InDesign due to grabage collection in Alfresco (deleting temporary file)"? Could you please provide more detail backgroud for us?

Thanks,
Zhiqiang

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5. dmatejka,

Oct 27, 2010 3:31 PM in reply to Zhiqiang Liu

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Hi Zhiqiang,
of course, no problem.
We have been experimenting with alfresco community edition since 2.1 (I think). We wanted to use alfresco as our repository and workflow service for our design projects. As we are small pre-press company based on WIN/ADOBE solutions we are using InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator as a daily tools for the production.

The scenario was to use Alfresco CIFS as a shared drive on a local network to take care about versioning and approval workflow with our clients (Clients would use alfresco explorer/share to submit the assets/approve the proofs and receive the output). We have been able to solve most of the hassle and I have produced very basic Flex app for creting complex directory structure with perrmissions and simple workflow customized for each project (using .acp and webscripts).

The problem was that after editting an InDesign document it crashed when attemting to save. Time that the document was edited played a role in the occurence of such a behaviour so it let us to join this beahviour with the alfresco's garbage collector. I think that the temporary file that has been created by InDesign when editing was somehow destroyed by garbage collector which caused InDesign to crash...

BUT.. as we are pre-press company we do not have any coder available. So this all are only assumtions after several months of trying... I can be wrong of the cause....

I was trying to bring this issue in alfresco forum two times, but there was no answer or anybody with the same problem.

Now alfresco in CE 3.4 with Activiti starting to take care about the workflow seems to be a good start to get back to our plans. Having DRIVE2 working hugged on Alfresco server would make several of my workflow dreams come true Especially with such an easy way to connect FLEX with alfresco using webservices. Not to say if alfresco can render previews of adobe formats.. fantastic...

wuuuuu... having two more lives to try everyhing I have in my mind would be fantastic ))

Best regards,

Daniel

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6. dimgy,

Nov 5, 2010 3:46 AM in reply to Zhiqiang Liu

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Hi Zhiqiang,

concerning InDesign and Alfresco CIFS, we are experiencing exactly the same problems, which I documented but wasn't able to sort out with Alfresco :-(
You can find details in my posts on the English and German Alfresco Forums - the German has more infos, but sadly, no solution.

http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=28084
http://forums.alfresco.com/de/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=632

In case you need more infos, you can contact me anytime.

Kind Regards,

R.

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7. Zhiqiang Liu,

Nov 5, 2010 5:33 AM in reply to dimgy

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Hi,

I guess that alfresco CIFS deletes the lock file generated by InDesign, and then InDesign will go to the protective mode.

Thanks,
Zhiqiang

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8. dimgy,

Jan 5, 2011 3:09 AM in reply to KenToole

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Hi Ken,

what's your current plan for the public release of the CMIS Connector as a part AdobeDrive 2 ?
We've been setting up and planning a project and would like to start implementung it when the official AD2 CMIS connector is released. Hence, infos on your current roadmap would be appreciated !

Thx and Kr,

dimgy.

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9. LUXMEDIA,

Jan 6, 2011 8:52 AM in reply to ThomasL.

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Hi,

we are also working with creative suite (on mac os 10.6 clients) and alfresco 3.4b (on debian lenny and tomcat6 server) and adobe drive 2.0 with cmis connector (used the stable release with the cmis-connector jar files of the pre-release on labs). Unfortunatly we are not happy with the solution since drive 2 and alfresco crash very often:

Browsing files via "Finder" and check-in/check-out sometimes causes freezing of client-pc which forces a dirty shut down of the machine. (as described here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/858/cpsid_85851.html)
Bridge has other problems. Browsing of files works mostly but if i check-out a document, edit it and check it in back again bridge sometimes crashes and shows after restart nothing within adobe drive but an empty, not accessible, folder. The result: restart the computer.
InDesign does have problems with the editing of files on the alfresco cmis drive. InDesign crashes suddenly when i try to place a new mediafile or try to save the indesign document (a normal intermediate save, no check-in!) or simply scroll the doc. After that, the complete adobe family crashes (ps hangs, dreamweaver hangs a.so.). After restarting and starting InDesign again to recover the document InDesign prompts "the server-version of DOCNAME.indd seems to be deleted". Ok, i try to open the docuemnt again and what i get is the last checked-in state, not my saved file. A very annoying behavior since i dont want to check in every little or medium change of the document to avoid data-loss. A fluid workflow is impossible!

The "Share"-webclient of alfresco works perfectly and very reliable, so i assume the problems within drive 2 and maybe mac os 10.6?

Whats the latest Issue-State for this major problems, cause i assume others losing their heads with the same problems...?

I have noticed that the working copy of a document one is editing is saved directly on the server beside the orig-document. I presume that this makes the editing more crash-prone, wouldn't be a local copy better, also in context of performance? How is the cache folder used, which i can define and allocate within the options of drive 2.0?

regards,
Volker Lux

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10. Laurel Zimmer,

Jan 13, 2011 10:45 PM in reply to ThomasL.

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I am pleased to announce that an update to Adobe Drive 2 is scheduled to be released approximately within the next 6 weeks (release timing subject to change).

This update will include the following key updates and several important bug fixes:

CMIS Connector
A production release of the CMIS connector will be made available with the download. The CMIS connector enables basic access to servers that implement the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification. CMIS is a standard for improving interoperability between Digital Asset Management servers. It specifies a domain model, plus a set of services and protocol bindings for web services (SOAP) and AtomPub.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Management_Interoperability_Servi ces.

Connector API Improvements
· Additional APIs have been added to improve extensibility capabilities
· Comments are no longer lost when promoting a version

Adobe Drive Connect UI Improvements
When adding a drive or setting a source and target server for data migration, all available connectors are listed automatically in the Adobe Drive Connect UI. In addition, there is the ability to customize connector names, icons, descriptions and more.

When using Adobe Drive to connect to a Version Cue CS4 Server, Adobe Drive no longer returns the error “The server could not be connect.” when a Version Cue Server has a URL that doesn’t start with versioncue://.

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11. LUXMEDIA,

Jan 14, 2011 8:10 AM in reply to Laurel Zimmer

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Nice to hear that there is a scheduled update in the near future!
I'm looking forward to the bugfixes within this version.

Will Bugfixes for the InDesign problems and the Mac OS 10.6 Finder freezings be part of it?

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12. dmatejka,

Jan 14, 2011 8:40 AM in reply to Laurel Zimmer

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great!
looking forward to test it. Would be nice if there is finally a solution..

fingers crossed

Daniel

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13. Matthew Laun,

Jan 14, 2011 1:09 PM in reply to LUXMEDIA

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@LUXMEDIA
Can you tell us if your Mac clients that are showing what you believe to be the issue Knowledgebase article cpsid_85851 are running any kind of virus protection of other hard drive monitoring utilities? It's only the presence of some other software scanning the Adobe drive mounted volumes that would introduce that issue, so if you can identify that software, you can disable it to avoid the issue. Because the issue stems from third party software scanning the drive, I don't expect this to be addressed in the upcoming release. If there is no software scanning the Adobe Drive volume, then the issue is probably different than the documented one you've referred to.

Sincerely,
Matthew

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14. jiali@adobe.com,

Jan 16, 2011 9:00 PM in reply to LUXMEDIA

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Hi Volker Lux,

We try to reproduce issue2 and issue3 on Mac 10.6 and alfresco 3.4b. but all fail to reproduce.
For issue2, we want to confirm following question:
1.Which product did you use to edit document when interacting with Bridge?( we take Photoshop to reproduce.)
2.You edit,and check in the document in Product then return back to Bridge again, right?( we follow this step.)

For issue3,
1. Which media file type did you place in the Indesign document?(we use mp3,flv. both managed and unmanaged)
2. Can you help to provide one test file for Indesign?(Thanks very much)

If you encounter these issue again,Please help to post the product crash data.

Thanks,
Jianfeng

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15. Laurel Zimmer,

Jan 31, 2011 4:29 PM in reply to Laurel Zimmer

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The Adobe Drive 2.1 Update is now available: http://www.adobe.com/downloads/updates/

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16. LUXMEDIA,

Feb 3, 2011 4:51 AM in reply to ThomasL.

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i couldnt reproduce the freezing problems within MacOS finder in the last couple of days (after installing drive 2.1), so i hope its gone. We also revealed the issues within Bridge:

Bridge and adobe Drive were started automatically at the system startup on each client, the ordering is set to load drive at first. But: Adobe Drive takes a little to establish the connection to the server and meanwhile Bridge has started. So Bridge has problems to build the links to a server which isnt connected at this state, later on it works, but inside Bridge's favorites one get a very strange icon without description if you click on "Adobe Drive" in the favs panel. The solution for a clean behavior is to remove Bridge from the auto startup and start it manually after the server-connection ist completely established. This solves any problems within Bridge. I think some unix programmers could implement a delay for the Drive and Bridge autostart on macs but unfortunatly i have no skilled guys finding an approach for that....

so a part of our problems is solved but a major part still is not: The InDesign crashes. It's still behaving very unhandy and unreliable. I started to accustom myself to first check out any Document manually within Bridge an then open it with InDesign. But if i place media files within the documents that have maybe visibility overrides or exceed the 100MB limit of filesize i have to bargain for an indesign crash "the server version has been deleted". I just have this problems with designing a twosided flyer which is based an 1GB psd (from the correspdonding A1-poster) at the front and has some linkings to a "SmartCatalog" CSV. Now im trying to place the product image which is within a 300MB PSD and if i do that InDesign crashes, again and again and again... its driving me nuts. I can reproduce this behavior also with some other PSD-picture-files.

Photoshop works very well with Drive, alfresco and the Check-in Check-Out process but InDesign doesnt.
So i suspect InDesign or the interoperability of InDesign and Drive of causing the errors.

greetings,
Volker

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17. Matthew Laun,

Feb 3, 2011 9:22 AM in reply to LUXMEDIA

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Volker,
Can you list the specific steps involved to reproduce the crash? Also, include give me example dimensions, resolution, and colorspace of one of the files that fails, so I can build one similar to it for my testing. If I can reproduce it, I'll get it to the dev team to investigate.

Matthew

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18. LUXMEDIA,

Feb 15, 2011 2:35 AM in reply to Matthew Laun

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Hello Matthew,

i hope i could solve my indesign crash problem. Due to a fresh alfresco installation and a fileupload of the local/versioncue files to the new alfresco database most files are initial versions on the server and have not been saved out of their specific programs yet. If i open the relevant PSD file and save it as new version again, the problem is gone. Maybe there was a fault within the initial file upload!?

But i noticed another issue within drive: the server connection can't be established sometimes at startup. The clients are shutdown at the evening of every workday, at the next morning sometimes the serverconnection (is set to automatically connect at startup) could not be established. The server is in the drive list and available, but if i try to connect manually, it says "authentication fails" but the authdata ist correct. Restarts of the client could not solve the problem. The only solution is to remove the server from the drive list and add it as new server again - BUT: if i do so and i have still files checked-out (and tmp files of the programs are on the server) they will all be deleted and all changes are lost! Very annoying, i lost a whole day of work due to this problem.

I couldn't find any solution yet.

regards,
Volker

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19. Matthew Laun,

Feb 15, 2011 4:03 PM in reply to LUXMEDIA

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@LUXMEDIA,
First, check to ensure that the following folder has permissions set such that it and it's children are read/write for the user account you're logged in with:
Mac: Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CS5ServiceManager/
Win: C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Application Data\Adobe\CS5ServiceManager\

If permissions are set correctly, and you still have the problem. Try the following:
1) Quit Adobe Drive.
2) Use the Task Manager (Win) or Activity Monitor (Mac) to quit the CS5ServiceManager task.
3) Move the folder mentioned above to some safe place for back up (you can restore if this doesn't help).
4) Restart Adobe Drive, establish your connection, and see if it sticks.

Matthew

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20. Lee Hui,

Feb 15, 2011 11:48 PM in reply to LUXMEDIA

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Hello LUXMEDIA,

Could you please clarify your case?

In our understanding: AD can’t connect to server automatically after restart OS when the AD is set to automatically connect, right?
According to this understanding, we tried to reproduce the issue with AD 2.1 and alfresco 3.4.a (which is installed on Windows 7 32bit) on Mac 10.6, the result is: AD can connect to CMIS server automatically.

But we have one known issue with AD automatic connect:
1.    Add one CMIS server (IPV6 is enabled on the server machine) and Set automatically connects.
2.    Restart OS.
3.    Disconnect after AD connect to server.
4.    Connect to server again.
Results: There will be error message: ‘The server could not be connected’.

For your mentioned issue, could you provide the following information?
1.    The alfresco server’s version
2.    The OS type of the machine that host alfresco server
3.    Check whether IPV6 is enabled on the server host machine.
4.    Post the log file: CS5ServiceManager_java.log which is in following location: Users/ [username]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CS5ServiceManager/logs/ on Mac.

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