Well, after a year away from blogging, in favor of Twitter, IM and just general laziness, I’m fulfilling a New Year’s resolution to get back to blogging.

My travel calendar is already filled into May, so there will be plenty to report on. I look forward to your comments, suggestions, etc. The first stop of the year will be up in San Francisco next week – and although the annual gathering of Mac-geeks is also occuring at that time, sadly I’ll be in an all day meeting in my SF office, followed by a trip down to San Jose for meetings on Wednesday… Sigh… At least I’ll be “close” to the happenings and look forward to Steve’s announcements.

Until next time, Prost!!!

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!

There’s only a little over a week left until we’ll be wow’ing the crowds in Scandinavia with a full day of seminars. If you happen to live in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki or Oslo, make sure to check out your regional adobe.com site under the events section for all the details.

In a nutshell, we’ll be doing two separate seminars. The first seminar is a four hour seminar in the morning focusing on cross-media web workflows, in which we’ll look at prototyping for the web, designing standards-based XHTML sites, creating and publishing video for the web and creating interactive Flash content. In the afternoon, we’ll turn our attention to Rich Internet Applications using Flex, and then taking those applications (or building entirely new ones) to the desktop using Adobe Air. My colleague, Mike Downey, and I will take you through using Dreamweaver, Flash and/or Flex to build the next generation of internet-enabled desktop applications in Air.