Communication from Adobe around recent issues

John Metzger asked me to post the following message:

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An open communication around recent issues reported with the latest deployment of Adobe Digital Publishing.

I’d like to open a direct dialog between the Adobe Digital Publishing team and current customers (pre-release and production) around the release we deployed the week of 6/13. 

First, I’d like it known that we are listening to our customers and working to fix issues with the latest release. We have employees actively reading the pre-release and production forums, trying to cull out bugs from the various user scenarios. We also gather information from our staff in the field and try to respond. Your concerns do not fall on deaf ears. We have engineers and QE working on the reported problems, fixing our highest concern which is the errors you are receiving while uploading and downloading content to our hosted services. We have fixes in the process of being tested, with in an effort to deploy a hot fix as soon as we are comfortable with the changes.  This is our highest priority item.

You can help us fix the problem by continuing to report issues on the forums. When you do report an issue it helps us to have the following pieces of information.

1) The toolset and version being used to upload content (are you using the old content bundler workflow or the new Folio Producer)?
2) If you are using the Folio Producer, have you used the acrobat.com backdoor to modify the folio?
3) Did you cancel any uploads while others were in progress?  see a network outage, or a failure during upload?
4) Do you see any pattern of particular content type that is causing errors?
5) Account ID (so we can search our logs for failures)
6) Any failure codes or messages

We may reach out to you directly and ask for content and other information so we can attempt to replicate your situation from our side.

Secondly, we need to improve our communication channels now that the product is being released to a wider audience. We need to do a better job explaining the compatibility matrix between the various parts of the solution. Many of you upgraded to the recent authoring release without understanding that the viewer in the Apple store that supported V13 was not available. Due to the lengthy approval time to get our viewer through the Apple process, we’ve never held back the other parts of the solution waiting for the viewer to be available in the Apple store. Other platform vendors have a much shorter approval process. We prefer to get the tools into the hands of our customers as soon as they are ready. Long time users of the solution understand the interaction and the upgrade process. We will do a better job explaining these scenarios to newer users of the tools. We are working on expanding the channels of communication to educate our users, sales and support staff of these interactions.

Thirdly, some users are asking for the return of desktop folio production and control without going to the cloud. We are actively working on features that re-enable these work flows while also addressing the security concerns of our larger publishers. Some of these features include the ability to author disconnected folios, and push to the cloud at a time of your choosing and the ability to preview content on a locally connected device. This does not mean we are re-enabling the Apple concept of side loading, where you import a local .folio file into the Adobe Content Viewer via iTunes. We are actively working on these features but I can not share when they will be available to customers just yet. If you are a customer who has purchased the Digital Publishing Suite, you may contact your reseller or Adobe Account Manager to participate in roadmap briefings.

Fourth, the ability for pre-release customers to manipulate .folio content through the Acrobat.com organizer was a bug. It was not a feature of the product. Digital Publishing customers get access to the suite of services through Digitalpublishing.acrobat.com. We built a specific set of tools and UI around the production tasks of editing metadata, arranging article order and interaction with our distribution service. Those services use Acrobat.com as infrastructure to enable this functionality. Moving forward, Digital Publishing will continue building a customer experience tailored to production tasks and disabling any back door access through the Acrobat.com organizer. Fixing this bug has surfaced features that our customers would like see in the Folio Builder panel. We are working on adding article ordering and a better Digital Publishing sharing experience to our creative customers through the Folio Builder Panel.

I hope that this message clarifies our current status, priorities and addresses concerns that Adobe isn’t listening to the concerns of its customers. I hope that you continue using the product and continue expressing yourselves on the pre-release and product forums. We are listening and actively working toward building a better product.

John Metzger
Product Manager - Digital Publishing