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.