It's hard to overstate the importance of the designer and developer community at Adobe. We are working diligently to incorporate customer perspective and feedback into everything that we do—engineering, marketing, content, beta programs, community involvement, and so on. With that in mind, I would like to share my thoughts about developer relations and give you an update on some of the things we're working on as we integrate into a single, combined company.

In developer relations, our focus is to ensure that developers are happy and successful working on the Adobe platform. That's a pretty broad statement but it really is indicative of the range of things we do. To be a little more specific, our work falls into four overall areas: contributing to the Adobe community, encouraging early adopters, helping Adobe build better products, and being a Johnny-on-the-spot.

Being Responsive

Johnny-on-the-spot, huh? I know it's a funny expression but it's an important part of what we do. We pay attention to what's going on in the community and jump in with quick solutions when we see or predict the need. Here's a great example: Last spring when lots of folks were getting interested in Ajax, Christian Cantrell and others put together an integration kit to make it easy for developers to use Macromedia Flash and Ajax together. That functionality is now part of the new Flash Player 8, but the integration kit gave developers a really useful tool in the interim. It's also a great example of how we can be responsive to the needs and interests of the developer community.

We spend a lot of time online making sure that folks have the information and knowledge they need to do their best work. Writing blogs and participating in mailing lists and online forums make up a big part of the day for folks like Scott Fegette, John Dowdell, Bill Perry, and Danny Dura. We work hard to stay in touch with what our customers are saying about using our products and to ensure that they've got what they need to be productive.

You've probably noticed that we spend a lot of our time online focusing on our up-and-coming technologies, like Flash Lite 2 and Flex 2.0, making sure the early adopters have the information and help they need to be productive on the leading edge. We appreciate their early support and try to do everything we can to help them be successful. In fact, we built Adobe Labs (formerly Macromedia Labs) expressly to give the community early access to prerelease technology and to have conversations about what works and what you would like to see changed in future releases.

If you haven't done so already, check out the Macromedia News Aggregator. It's a great way to stay up to date with conversations about the technologies and products in which you're most interested. In fact, if you read MXNA already, you've probably noticed folks like Ben Watson and Mike Potter who blog regularly about LiveCycle and are now part of our combined developer relations team.

Speaking of new team members, Sandra Lee-Doersam and her Acrobat and PDF/L SDK team have joined us. We're deep in discussions about how we will integrate our technologies, samples strategy, and the like. It's all very exciting.

Improving Our Products

While we spend lots of time visibly interacting with the community, we also do some very important work behind the scenes. We take what we learn from those conversations (especially about prerelease technologies) back to our engineering teams so that we can make improvements in those products moving forward. Of course, our team isn't the only one responsible for this important work, but we take it as a top priority to ensure that the issues you raise and the perspectives you share with us are incorporated into our engineering plans. We also work with partners across the industry to ensure that you've got all the resources you need. We work with publishers, training companies, component vendors, conference coordinators, and a variety of other companies to provide Adobe developers with the best resources available.

The Developer Center and the Edge newsletter are also a core part of our work in developer relations. To make sure that developers are happy and successful working on the Adobe platform, we provide great information and technical resources. We put much thought and careful planning into what the Edge newsletter and the Developer Center provides, and we're working closely with the web team to integrate the Macromedia and Adobe online developer resources. Craig Goodman and his team work tirelessly to bring you articles and other content about the technologies and products you care about most. Many folks in the developer community write articles for the Developer Center too. If you are interested in writing for our site, please let us know. We are always looking for great new contributors.

Have you ever gotten an answer online from a Team Macromedia member or gone to a presentation at a user group meeting, or maybe even attended a user group meeting inside your company? Christine Lawson and Ed Sullivan run the programs that support and enable the people who spend their time sharing their knowledge about our products and technologies. They are hard at work with their manager, Jonathan Wall, and others to expand these programs to incorporate products, technologies, and the broader community from across the combined company. Stay tuned for updates and more details in the coming weeks.

Extending Our Reach Overseas

Several developers have asked me what the developer relations team does outside the English-speaking world. At Macromedia, we were primarily focused on the English-speaking part of the world. Now we are starting to act more globally. John Koch, who joined developer relations just before the Adobe acquisition was finalized, focuses on working with community leaders in the Asia Pacific region. We're localizing more Developer Center articles into Japanese, Korean, and Traditional and Simplified Chinese to support developers better in Asia.

Now that we're a combined company, we're working with other people across Adobe to extend our reach further. Even though we still have a long way to go, I'm thrilled to be making progress in our team's effort to contribute to the global community.

I hope this marks the beginning of a long and productive conversation. Now it's your turn to be a Johnny-on-the-spot. Drop me a note and share your thoughts and perspective on the developer community and what you'd like to see Adobe doing in the future. You can reach me at sspaldin@adobe.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

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