Well, I’m off to the Adobe office in San Francisco for an all day meeting on Tuesday, during which we will be discussing how to improve our outreach into the community of Adobe software users. It sounds so cliche to say that it is our users that make Adobe software what it is – but, in fact this is very true. With each product cycle, our development teams visit and listen to hundreds, if not thousands of customers – gathering their likes and dislikes, their challenges and workarounds and their wildest dreams – in order to come up with new features or simply enhance existing features. But during the intervening 18-24 months before a new software release, it falls to groups such as mine, the Evangelism teams, to help keep up the sales and marketing momentum as well as to establish relationships with our users.

While we think we have done a pretty good job at establishing relationships in the community, we realize that there is still a lot of work to be done. We’ll be brainstorming ideas on Tuesday, but I would love to hear your thoughts on how we could be better at our job.

Some open questions from my side – how do you make a decision to upgrade or purchase new software? Do you simply read reviews on the web? Talk to colleagues? Do you attend seminars or trade shows? How about online seminars? Do you find them as effective (or perhaps even more effective) than an in-person seminar?

I’ll be eagerly awaiting your responses – and ready to pass my findings on to the “heads-that-be”… Prost!