Chapter 13. Integrating Version Cue into Your Workflow

As a creative professional, your time is best spent creating not wasting time chasing down files or managing them for your design team. Whether you're a designer, photographer, service provider, web or print publisher, or simply a colleague working remotely, Version Cue can manage your file versions to make you more productive and save time. Version Cue lets you easily create, manage, and find different versions of your project files by giving you simple, unified access to all versions of your files. If you collaborate with others, you and your team members can share project files in a multi- user environment that protects content from being accidentally overwritten.

Almost anyone who has collaborated on a project with others knows what can go wrong when you don't use a file manager: You open the wrong version of a file by mistake, thinking it's the current one. Or you open the latest version of a file, make edits, and save them before changing the version number. A colleague goes off to lunch with a file left open from the server, making it unavailable to anyone else.

Here's how Version Cue can help you maintain file integrity and team sanity . Built into Creative Suite, this file-management feature for individuals and small work groups lets you do any of the following:

• Create and manage versions of your files as you work on a project.

• Visually browse through your files with Adobe Bridge and your CS2 applications.

• View information about the files you're working on (called metadata ) to help you find files more easily, without having to open up the files.

• Create alternates to keep alternate versions of a file active.

• Share projects with others in your workgroup more easily and safely, without losing data.

• Control file security on your project.

• Review PDF files collaboratively through a browser or web page.

This chapter shows how Version Cue can make you and your workgroup more productive, and discusses its pros and cons. We introduce you to the Version Cue workflow by describing a sample collaboration of three designers. Then we show how to set up Version Cue appropriately for your environment and workflow, and create and manage projects for individuals and small groups. We'll also discuss strategies for collaborating successfully in a workgroup, and how to create a more controlled environment for larger groups using the Administration utility.

About Version Cue

How many times did you wish for a tool that could manage your files easily and consistently, without interrupting your workflow and jeopardizing the integrity of your work, so that you could keep on working and creating? Version Cue in Adobe Creative Suite 2 is that tool.

Most people don't use special tools to manage their graphic files. They rely on their operating system, trusting themselves to rename or renumber files as they create new file versions. Sandee and Steve used such a convention when they started this book in Microsoft Word (which doesn't understand Version Cue); for example, Steve named the third version of this chapter 13_VersionCue_3sw.doc. Without having a tool like Version Cue to manage our versioning, we or one of our editors sometimes worked on the wrong version of a file!

What Version Cue Can Do

Version Cue can solve many problems that occur when you're using Adobe Creative Suite and relying on a traditional operating system-based workflow. It helps you share assets (the collection of files included in a project) with others and offers some advantages over using more complex file-management systems. Here's how your workflow can benefit from using Version Cue:

• It's easier to track files using Version Cue.

  A traditional system relies almost exclusively on filenaming to identify a file. But many files may have similar or even the same names. Typically, you must spend precious minutes, or even hours, opening files to find the correct ones. Version Cue supplements names with thumbnails of the common file types used in Creative Suite InDesign, Illustrator, PDF, and images files and with additional metadata about the file. The metadata can include information saved automatically with the file (for instance, file creation date and font and color information in an InDesign file) and also comments you make when you save versions. This information can be searched within a Version Cue project.

• You can manage files better without relying on unwieldy filenaming conventions.

  Filenaming conventions are difficult to use and error-prone . In a typical workflow, it's common to begin saving changes to a file before remembering to save it under a different name , overwriting your own or someone else's work. Or maybe a particular artist who worked on the project before handing it off created unique filenames, and then other team members on the project had to search in frustration for the right version. Version Cue tracks all versions of a file automatically; you don't have to rely on filenaming conventions to handle versioning. When an artist opens a file from a Version Cue workspace, it will be the latest version. As team members work, they can easily save new versions back to the workspace, and Version Cue automatically takes care of tracking those versions.

• Version Cue provides valuable status information about files.

  Sometimes you may need access to a file to print a proof or to place an image, but the file is in use by someone else and unavailable because it is locked by the operating system. Version Cue visually shows the status of all files in a project, including whether another team member is using a particular file. It even allows you to open a copy of the file for example, to print a proof but warns of the consequences of having more than one person editing the same file.

• Tools help you manage files flexibly and transparently .

  Version Cue is tightly integrated with Adobe Bridge and all the CS2 applications. You use it from within the applications you're already using. You don't have to explicitly check files in and out of a database (as is required by some file-management systems). In contrast, other file-management systems rely on third-party tools that can impose a very structured workflow, be hard to learn and follow, or require users to switch out of their graphics applications to check files in and out.

• Version Cue requires no special maintenance or support.

  Unlike some expensive file-management systems that can require a lot of maintenance and support, Version Cue can be used just as it's installed with Adobe Creative Suite, with no extra setup or maintenance. However, for larger workgroups, Version Cue can be installed on a server. It provides administrative tools that can be used to back up and restore projects, create archives, establish file security, and so on. Groups of as many as 10 or more (Adobe has tested Version Cue with groups as large as 30) can benefit from working collaboratively using Version Cue.

When Version Cue Might Not Be the Right Fit

But Version Cue can't be all things to all people. There are times when it might not work for you.

• Version Cue isn't a media-asset manager. It can't search for or manage files archived on CDs or DVDs as can some software designed for working with images.

• Version Cue is intended either for individuals or small workgroups, so it might not be appropriate for a very large workgroup with all members needing access to the same set of files. (However, even in large companies, most workgroups consist of fewer than 20 people.)