Free, lots of storage, lots of cool Photoshop-inspired effects and tools, share your photos with your friends. It's what Flickr would be if it was created by a multimedia company instead of your regular Web 2.0 crowd.

Kudos to Adobe for getting out there in the Software-as-a-Service market with another cool Flex-based offering, showing what the technology can really do.

My only grumble was the length of time it took for my verification email to arrive (which may not have been Adobe's fault). Once I was in, uploading, touching up and sharing photos was a breeze. A great experience!

If you haven't seen Buzzword - which they've demo'd a few times now - check out the screen shots on their main web site. It's very, very slick.

You'll learn how we built the back end that supports several functions behind Acrobat Connect and Adobe Document Center - and Kuler - as well as some of our pain points and, in particular, the problems that arise when dealing with error handling around the boundaries of systems in a Service-Oriented Architecture.

Also check out this Tech Note and my own hints and tips post from about a year ago.

It's a Flex application, backed by Java code - and a number of LiveCycle components, and it also leverages the trial signup / terms of service Flex application we launched as part of Adobe Acrobat Connect a few weeks ago.

You can try the Adobe Document Center for free until the end of the year (the same as with Adobe Acrobat Connect). The commercial release is expected to be available in English in early 2007 at an introductory price of $19.99 per month (or $199 per year). Additional languages will be added throughout 2007.

You can see the full range of Adobe Online Services, all of which offer free trials.

Perhaps in the past you've tried to wave your mouse over the thing you want people to see or you've click-dragged over something to cause an application highlight in order to emphasize it for your audience?

None of the above work all that well for a remote broadcast event: you simply can't do the former and the latter options usually don't transmit well because the mouse movement may not appear in real time for all your attendees and the default application highlight often causes the text to be much harder to read.

Now you can "Pause and Annotate" - an option in the sharing drop-down (on a Mac, you get a little Connect icon in the menu bar!) - which freeze your shared screen and brings back the main Connect meeting room window with a set of drawing tools down the right hand edge. You can draw on the screen (freehand lines, boxes, circles), highlight things with a colored "marker", and write text over the screen. This is a very effective way of bringing something to the attention of your audience and explaining it visually!

To go back to regular screen sharing, simply click the Resume button (which appears in annotate mode).

The Connect drop-down also allows you to change what you are sharing (which windows, applications etc) so you can switch your sharing setup dynamically during your presentation.

I figured I'd start a series of short posts highlighting some of the features I'm finding very useful that are either new in this release or which I had never noticed before in the Breeze product.

#1. The Note pod and the Chat pod both let you email the contents of the pod via the 'actions' popup (the cog in the bottom right of each pod). This is a great way to handle the minutes from your meetings because you can easily capture both the notes you took during the meeting as well as the entire discussion that took place.

I noticed this during the cf.Objective() 2007 steering committee meeting this morning. Nice!

Oh, yes, next year's cf.Objective() conference is being planned. As you can see from the site, the location and dates are fixed and the committee is figuring the budget and fee structure right now as well as nailing down the track and topic guidelines. Expect to see a call for speakers and topics within the next few weeks.

Me? I'll be in San Francisco, helping the team put the finishing touches on Adobe Acrobat Connect which is "expected to be available in November 2006 as a free trial version through the end of the calendar year" (see the press release from September 18th).

It's also On Safari next week in Portland, OR which is effectively the Bengal breed national cat show.

Charlie has also done a great job pulling together a fairly extensive listing of all the recorded Breeze presentations out there - see his User Group Television section.

When I get a few minutes (hah!) I'll be adding this to my download links so this post is mostly a reminder to myself but I hope other folks find it useful too...

That's the official announcement of the new product line for which I've been working on some of the back end systems. More details in due course.

It will be very interesting to see what people do with this...

JamJar lets you create "spaces" that you can invite your colleagues and friends into, to plan events, share files, discuss topics, share notes etc.

To learn your way around JamJar once you are logged in, look in the Connections pod and open Community Spaces and then double-click the Welcome to JamJar space.

Enjoy!

p.s. No, this is still not the 'top secret' project. This was built by our Seattle-based team (Protect an Adobe PDF File was built by our San Jose-based team).

You can create "policies" and apply them to any PDF document that you want to distribute. The policy determines who can open the document, what they can do with it and the period during which the document will be "valid".

For example, you could create a policy that allows just your team members to open, print and comment on a specification. Or you could create a policy that allows a special offer to be read - but not printed - by anyone for the next 14 days. Or...

The online service also lets you track events on each policy-protected document.

You can sign up for a free trial of this service by visiting the Create Adobe PDF Online site. The trial will allow you to test drive both the Protect an Adobe PDF File Beta as well as the long-standing Create Adobe PDF Online service.

Behind the scenes, the heavy lifting is done by a combination of LiveCycle products.

NetSuite, provider of business applications for small businesses, available through an online Software-as-a-Service model, have struck a deal with CompUSA to promote NetSuite at the retail chain, making CompUSA a reseller for the services.

I think this is a good indication that Software-as-a-Service is moving into mainstream acceptance.

My wife's mom'n'dad were in town last week and my wife was keeping them occupied while I was at work. Their hotel had free wifi so my wife installed MSN Messenger on dad's laptop so she could IM me at work and let me know what the plans were for the evening. Unfortunately, MSN's default install sets it to start at Windows startup and so once dad went back to Denver, every time he logged on (to AOL), MSN would kick my wife off chat.

Now, dad's not a computer expert so trying to talk him through the MSN preferences to reset the start at boot time flag would have been hard. Doubly so, since he uses Windows and we use Macs, and we use Adium and Fire instead of MSN!

Breeze to the rescue! I sent him a Breeze link on AIM and he was able to log on as a guest easily enough. I made him a presenter and he installed the Breeze add-in and rejoined the room. I got him to share his desktop and then let me request control of his system. He sat and watched while I located MSN, located the preference and disabled it and quit MSN. Quite painless.

He was very impressed with how easy it was - and admitted that he found it pretty strange to watch his computer doing things without touching the keyboard!

Breeze. Remote technical support made easy.

Since the acquisition closed, I've been looking at a variety of new roles here and I recently accepted one that I officially started yesterday. I am now part of Adobe's Hosted Services group. I'm a "Senior Computer Scientist" now (finally my grey hairs count for something) and will be continuing my architecture focus, likely in a much more hands on manner.

So what does the Hosted Services group do? Well, we "own" Breeze ASP (hosted) and a variety of PDF services, including Create Adobe PDF Online. My role will focus on the software infrastructure behind the services. It's a very interesting space to be in as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is gaining increasing traction across the industry.

I won't be able to talk about what we have planned for the future (for obvious reasons) but I expect to be talking about a broader range of Adobe products and services over time. It will mean that I won't be as active in the ColdFusion community as I have been in recent years - fewer user group talks and much less involvement in most mailing lists - but I intend to remain very active with Model-Glue, ColdSpring, Reactor and CFEclipse - as well as continuing to work on Fusebox 5!

I hope you'll all keep reading, despite the slight change of focus here!

I responded to the speakers' mailing list with some tips for using Breeze effectively and figured that it would be good to share them more broadly in a somewhat more generic form.

Tip #1: Use a dual monitor setup - put the Breeze meeting up on the second screen with preview mode enabled so you can see what your audience sees (and the chat pod!) and share your primary screen.

This allows you to watch the chat so you know instantly if your audience are having problems and you can also take questions during your presentation.

Tip #2: Make sure you run through the audio configuration wizard in Breeze with the exact audio setup you plan to use in advance of the meeting. This will figure out the background silence levels and the sensitivity of your microphone. Go to Meeting > Audio Setup Wizard... once you're in Breeze.

Keep your head/mouth at a consistent distance from microphone during the configuration and during your talk! Some folks have a tendency to rock back and forth in their chairs while they present - this creates a bad audio experience for your listeners as you move closer and further from the mic! Update: Dave Watts suggested using a headset microphone and recommended USB headsets from Logitech and Plantronics.

Also make sure you have a quiet, private environment to broadcast from (cube farms are not a good environment for this, nor are most homes with kids and pets running loose!).

Tip #3: Create an effective presentation slide deck. Well, duh! This isn't just about Breeze but it's worth repeating anyway. Most presenters speak for 1-2 minutes per slide so bear that in mind when you're creating a presentation. If you have more than about 35 slides, you probably won't get through them all in a 50 minute presentation and you won't leave any time for Q&A!

Think about the structure. Most (effective) presentations typically have this sort of structure:

• Title slide (presentation title, your name, company, maybe email address).
• Goals of the talk - "what is this talk about?" - tell your audience why they are here and what they will (hopefully) learn
• Introduce yourself - "who am I and why should I be talking about this topic?" - establish your credentials but don't brag!
• Agenda - explain the structure of the talk - it's often a good idea to drop the agenda slide in between each major section of the talk so the audience know where they are and highlight the relevant part of the agenda slide each time.
• The meat of your talk... blah, blah, blah!
• Summary slide(s) - recap your main points and remind your audience of what they (should have) learned during the talk and this should probably mirror the earlier goals slide.
• Resources slide(s) - pull together all the books / links that your talk references and list them here so your audience can find them easily in the handouts or online later.
• Repeat title slide with full contact information - this is often easier with a regular slide layout than the graphical "title" layout used for the first slide.