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Company:
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Purpose:
A comprehensive suite of tools that bring together all of your creative tasks in one system.
Starting Price:
$1,229 new, $749 upgrade with previous version of PhotoShop
Reviewer's View
This is a blockbuster design package for a fraction of the cost of buying the pieces separately. It provides smooth integration between the different applications and a nifty new versioning software to hold it together. Your print folks will love it, but if you don't need GoLive, you should consider the Standard edition for $999 that leaves out the Web development package.
Suites are all the rage these days in the software industry, and they make sense from a business point of view. Why sell one piece of software when you can sell three, four, or five, and you not only move product, you lock the buyer into a whole mindset of how to get work done. As a consumer you win because you get a bunch of software for far less than you would have paid for the pieces individually (assuming you need all the pieces, of course). Although Adobe has boxed a series of related products in the past, this is their first integrated suite, and they have made a grand entrance with the Adobe Creative Suite Premium, a creative software powerhouse that includes Illustrator, ImageReady, PhotoShop, InDesign, GoLive, Acrobat 6.0 (which we covered in a review in the August/September EContent), and a new version management program called VersionCue. (The standard package, available for slightly less, leaves out Acrobat and GoLive.)
Software makers understand that managers aren't going to make purchasing decisions just because it seems like a "good deal;" the products have to increase productivity. Adobe has set up the suite so that all of the parts play nicely together, allowing your employees to leverage the power of each individual program and reuse content across the suite. As a manager, you have the power to approve the purchase of such a suite, but can you make sure your staff uses all of the pieces to maximize the savings?
That's the rub: Adobe has always been the darling of the print and art departments, and there is nothing that is going to change that in this package. On the...