Why you shouldn't rush to Adobe CS5
If you're an end-user of Adobe's Creative Suite (CS), which includes such applications at Photoshop and Illustrator, you're likely aware of the furor over the termination of support for Version Cue that coincided with the release of CS version 5 earlier this year. Version Cue allows users to track and update asset versions and metadata, and is accessed via Adobe Bridge. It's what allows users to see older versions, restore and delete them, from within CS. It's been a darling of small design shops, used as a very basic form of digital asset management.
Enterprise and mid-market DAM vendors have heavily depended on Version Cue and Bridge in a very different way -- they've integrated their own systems with them, allowing users to access, modify, and check in DAM-system-managed assets from within the Creative Suite. Just about every one of the DAM vendors we cover in our research has historically offered this functionality, so that creative users could happily never have to separately log on to a DAM via a web browser or other desktop app if they didn't want to. They could even upload comments and change metadata from within a Creative Suite application.
Alas, now that Version Cue is riding into the sunset, DAM vendors are lagging behind, forced to develop a new connector using "Adobe Drive." Adobe Drive is specifically for connecting to a 3rd-party DAM server. Adobe states that they
"...provide the Adobe Drive 2.0 SDK to third-party asset-management vendors. The SDK allows DAM vendors to create custom connectors for easy access to their servers. A custom connector can expose features such as check-in, version comments, and version retrieval."
Well that's all well and good, but the reality is, they're not available yet. Over the summer, I've spent several weeks with some of our research customers who had already upgraded to CS5, not realizing it would no longer work with their existing DAM, or be compatible with the DAM they're considering procuring. Vendors who have long offered CS integration now have to admit that they aren't integrated with CS5 -- though you'll be fine if you're still on CS4. For now.
It's only been a few months since Adobe's announcement, and it's going to take time before DAM vendors can develop proper, tested connectors. You may not want to be the guinea pig.
Adobe advises that "customers can ask potential [DAM] vendors if they provide an Adobe Drive 2.0 connector for Creative Suite 5," and that "Adobe has active partnerships with a number of DAM vendors. A complete list of these partners and contact information will be provided."
Hmmm, where's the list? Creative Suite users on the Adobe forms are still asking. Well, it's rather difficult to provide a list of DAM vendor partners who simply aren't offering the connection to CS5 yet, and probably won't for quite some time.
