Last year was the 20th year of ColdFusion and thanks to the enthusiastic participation of the customers it was a great hit. The celebrations culminated at the ColdFusion Summit 2015 which was the largest ColdFusion Summit we had till date.
2016 promises to be great year for ColdFusion with the new release. Some of the activities that we are planning on doing this year are:
1. ColdFusion Champions – We are creating a CF Champions team which would help us with community building, helping us with blogs and some technical articles. We already have Dave Ferguson, Dave Epler and Kev McCabe signed on. Look out for articles from them. If you are interested in joining the Champions team please reach out to me. This team would also help in promoting ColdFusion in some of the developer conferences. This is one of our efforts to rebuild the developer evangelist ecosystem so would appreciate all the help we could get.
2. User Groups – The ColdFusion user group managers have done an awesome job of helping us to keep in touch with our Developer base. UGMs like Dan Fredericks, Giancarlo to name a few have put in a lot of effort in making their groups meet regularly. We would continue to support the User Groups, if you want to create a new User Group in your area or want to find if there are any User Groups are there in your area, let us know we would help you.
3. E-Seminar and Technical articles – We would be having a Developer week in April first week which would talk about the new features of ColdFusion. This would be followed by a technical e-Seminar once every month. I would follow up on the time slot for the meeting very soon. If the community wants to contribute to the Technical articles or blogs on Adobe.com please reach out to me, Elishia or Rakshith. We would love to have you write about ColdFusion and would promote the articles so that it reaches out to our developers.
4. ColdFusion Summit – Last year we had around 500+ attendees for the ColdFusion Summit. This is one of the largest developer events at Adobe. This year the Summit would be held at Mandalay Bay on October 10th – 11th. The pricing for the event would be the same as last year. We hope to see a large participation this year since 95% have rated the quality of session content as above average and 93% have said that they are very likely to recommend this event to their peers.
5. ColdFusion Government Summit – Since most of our Government customers were not able to travel to Vegas we are having an one-day ColdFusion Summit for Government on March 9th in Washington DC at Washington Hiltion . We are also planning on having an event at our India office for the ColdFusion customers in India in Q3.
6. Sponsorships – We would be at our usual events like NC Dev con and CF Camp this year. We are also looking at other events where we could meet the decision makers and prospective new developers, so the list of events that we sponsor might increase.
7. Customer Outreach – We have been having 1:1 discussion with some of our large customers to let them know about what are the features in the new version of ColdFusion and working with them in case they have any issues. If you want us to have the Roadmap discussion with your organization please let us know.
These are some of the activities that have been planned for this year. If you have any other ideas about how best to increase ColdFusion presence do reach out to me Kishore@adobe.com
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@Dawes: I will repeat what I said in another post to you. Bring out concerns, if any, backed with sufficient information rather than calling some random string of words as a quote from Adobe employee.
None of your statements above are worthy enough for a proper response by Adobe or even from anyone outside of Adobe. Your post is the *real* joke here.
@Chris … good to see two people read my message. This is getting traction… and I’ll stay angry, you do the polite thing… hasn’t worked in over 15 years for Charlie and he’s a really, really nice guy. (sorry charlie for bringing you in)
now to see if anyone at Adobe reads this blog… (it’s a joke.. geez, it’s not like our income depends on this product or anything and Adobe want a bigger cut, so your kids have to work to pay the bills, while some desk-jockey pulls in the big bucks for brown-nosing the CC team – who haven’t even delivered git support – you know that tech that became mainstream 10 years ago)
This is war @chris, and there are rules in war. [evil laugh] hahahahahahahaha…
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For those with less than 15 years CF experience… the above is a joke…
Adobe _absolutely_ doesn’t care what you say or write. They do surveys of their top 5 customers and tell everyone else they listened. If you are not a top 5 customer, go use Lucee if you want to be heard or have a feature implemented. Adobe don’t give a crap about you, nor ColdFusion.
now enjoy submitting bugs, for they will collect dust, and eventually just get binned because they are too busy delivering an ‘API manager’ instead of a middleware engine.
I’ll leave you with an Adobe staff quote:
[laughing at the internal joke of ColdFusion] ‘The only reason ColdFusion not dead is it’s an ATM that keeps on spitting money’ (adobe employee quote)
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@Chris (#41) – Meh, I don’t blame Dawes for being so abrasive… I’ve been there, done that myself. I won’t hold it against him… he’s just venting his frustration.
@Shawn – agreed, a central marketing channel for ColdFusion would be delightful. I support the effort to focus on centralizing information (docs, downloads, blog, links to partners, links to developers blogs, link to Slack, etc.) and marketing under the domain and offer my help to Adobe and the community towards that effort.
This is getting a little rough. Lets get back on track.
Dawes I don’t think your going to get the reply you are looking for from an enterprise marketing team. Hard reality is, they will go down with the ship before there is an admittance of wrong doing. I have a segment of a client (also an enterprise marketing team for a big company) and despite clear and obvious facts showing failure, there is no point of failure that they would ever admit they were wrong or that they need to change. I even went over their head got nothing but dead air. I hear what your saying and I agree sometimes pressure must be applied to force change for those who don’t want it, and I think all that negativity on the release lead to this discussion now.
I would continue to push for the features you are looking for and take a victory lap in the fact that they are actually starting to seriously look into requests that have been proposed to improve relations.
I don’t think any marketing team looks forward to challenging the executives on the corporate goals of the company (why CF gets no respect on adobe.com). But now that the community overwhelmingly wants a central coldfusion.com for all things CF, hopefully that becomes a reality in the near future so the product can properly be marketed without their blessing.
It took A LOT to make a post with insights on product marketing in front of the eyes of the public. That is far from standard procedure. Now that the communications channel is open, lets not make it all about past failures, but instead future success and how to get there.
@Dawes (#40) – I’m sorry, I thought you a) understood how the internet works (this being a public comment thread, therefore open (and inviting) responses) and b) that’s what communities do – communicate. It’s in the name.
If you desire a private conversation about your ideas, then I recommend you email kishore@adobe.com.
In either case, please have a nice day!
@dawes
Shocked you don’t know who Denard is considering how long you’ve been in the community. And I really don’t appreciate you bad mouthing him, especially so publicly. I’d wager that he’s done a ton more for the benefit of this community than you ever have. In fact, this is the first I’ve ever heard of you. And if you could see how you come across… well, let’s just leave it there.
Just one final question… are you related to Acker Apple by chance? Wouldn’t surprise me.
@denard “the last bastion of someone with no argument – name calling.”
nope it’s ONLY making a personal attack because you have no point while pretending to be an Adobe marketing person – aka your comment. #poorfrom
Stop talking for Adobe, if you’re not a representative of Adobe… you talk as if you represent them and as people in the cfml community go in and out of Adobe, I assumed you work there from your tone.
Your comments were mostly wrong, and I have put your comment on my wall. You’re famous!
If you aren’t from Adobe, the I don’t need, nor want your response, I’m talking to Adobe, and pretending to be from Adobe and then answering like you don’t understand basic development techniques is really poor form. Let Adobe answer, it’s not your marketing page.
Dude, I’ve been in this community since 1998. I know the drill and until the day I can stand in a keynote of the CEO and ask half way through my questions, I’ll keep trying until someone gets it.
My request is simple, and Adobe know that. I just want an answer ‘why’. And you hijacked that conversation as you want to add your 2c. #movealong
If an Adobe staff member would like to remove his and my responses, they are welcome to answer correctly the questions.
@Elisha (#35) – Good to hear there will be more of them. I don’t frequent Facebook or Twitter, I’m afraid, so I missed your social media marketing, but good to hear you’ve been promoting it somewhere 😉
@Dawes (#36) – the last bastion of someone with no argument – name calling.
You asked some questions, I gave you some answers based on my own fights with Adobe over these very same things, and the reasoning behind some of the decisions Adobe has made that were relayed to me during those fights. I’ve been down this road, stayed on it for years – fought the good fight and became a bittervet as a result of my fighting for CFML with Adobe. Be my guest if you think you can do any better… I’ve learned to accept reality.
I’m sorry if you don’t like the message, but attacking the messenger is rather immature. The rest of your rant doesn’t deserve my time to respond as a result.
I totally agree the product should have been on the homepage for the day of launch. If global pushes back, then they are making the case for CF that you need your own product website because adobe.com has its own agenda, thus CF marketing should get additional marketing dollars to make it happen. Even if they don’t give CF extra funding its just two critical not to have.
Of the products we work with ALL of them have their own website in addition to some product pages on the mothership domain. Marketing isn’t agile enough without it.
Clearly Adobe Enterprise products are third string behind Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud and the company thinks supporting a third wheel in prime time is not to its benefit. You won’t convince them to change without elevating Adobe Enterprise to another level. The path has already been written. Microsoft took the seed (.Net & SQL Server) and spun it into Azure and its own cloud services & hosting. If Adobe had similar, Creative Cloud and the Marketing Cloud would be begging to integrate with Adobe Enterprise Services like companies foam at the mouth over AWS and Azure integration today. ColdFusion is the seed and the blueprints are in front of you. You just need to sell the CEO on the vision if CF is ever going to end up on the homepage. If it doesn’t its not the end of the world, but then you must operate with more independence. A product controlled website is step 1.
@denard – are you in a parallel universe?
– firstly CC is an enterprise product also #irony
now if you listened, you’d work out that a lot of us for DECADES disagree with Adobe’s view on ColdFusion; and also for CF support in Dreamweaver. #adobelistenforachange
ColdFusion is also both an enterprise and agency level product, either way I’ll restate that ANY other tech company with a big release would have it on the front page, no exceptions. It’s called marketing 101: tell people who DONT have your product about it… adobe don’t get this. People coming for CC would still find it, but they might also be introduced to CF… along with their manager. #really what a great way to get customers. #marketingfail #facepalm
I’d sack my marketing staff if any of my products on launch day weren’t front and centre. That’s a massive fail; community college marketing 101 fail…
If enterprise is your problem, create another site- you’re marketing that’s your job. #frick someone pay me to think for them.
“it has zero correlation to any of the CC products” <- right there, see what you did #omg
so when I code cfml in Dreamweaver (which I do every day) that zero correlation, how's that working for you now?
it's right up there with the guy that said there would only ever be 10 computers… #facepalm
Is that the most out of touch comment on the Adobe blog ever.(that's going straight to the pool room – dumbest Adobe comment ever) So none of CC's products generate web code that needs to interact with programming? riiiiiight. Do you really think that front end of websites has NOTHING to do with the backend… and PHP isn't a front end language…
as for dreamweaver you have bootsrap, but not zurb foundation, you've lost half your designers right there…
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Front-end developers still need backend code. I worked for Sencha as a trainer and technical sales rep I should know about UI and front end development and it's useless without backend code, or at least mocking backend (which dreamweaver doesn't do) Sencha uses cf for demos more than Adobe who sells it… #classicfail
There is a reason people use webstorm and intelliJ. They do BOTH well. Dreamweaver does front-end well, to a point, but then leaves you hanging when you need to develop something with it. (unless you're dumb enough to use jQuery mobile – which no-one in the real world does) It could do both well with php, cfml and others with a small effort (not confusing designers as designers code now too! #surprise)
"were removed from Dreamweaver because Adobe, rightfully, wanted to focus" – oh they wanted to focus… how many ide's for html have you got?
Adobe has Dreamweaver, CF Builder, Muse, now photoshop, brackets (and the internal version of brackets with some plugins)… seriously stop making new ides and get one right… there was nothing wrong with dreamweaver other than lack of documentation for building extensions (and lack of a webview type extension to roll your own in javascript)
They rightfully should have left the support "in" which is out of the way of designers, so so one would have raised an eyebrow? Don't you get how trivial this change is? Don't you get how a stupid decision due to ignorance, and could fix it in seconds effecting no-one who didn't use it before! #canyoureadenglish
my point is Adobe could service BOTH markets by just turning the features back on that devs want. geez. it's kindergarten level stuff, but adobe are still in diapers. just turn it on and we are happy, then target front end people – it wont be in their way anyway. it's really really really simple… turn on code colouring support for cfml, and allow cfc and cfm as default document… right there you've make 50% of the cf devs who use dreamweaver happy and you don't have to tell ONE blinking designer you did it did you! But you don't listen, you just cut and paste the standard 1980's marking quotes you did in 1980 like we don't matter. we do matter and with about 30 minutes of work you could make a lot of us happy but CHOOSE NOT TO, not because if will effect ANYTHING else.
Boy you make me mad. so selfish. 'but it's a front end ide'… right… cordova is a front end tool… PHP is a front-end language… I hope you don't lie to your kids like you do to your customers. #seriously
we should be saying 'well done' on a comments section on the release page of ColdFusion ,but we are here in a secret cave so no-one will know the new version is released #shhhhhh don't tell anyone.
@Denny – No worries, we are planning multiple eSeminars and this will be recorded for those that miss.
We’ve been promoting on FB and Twitter for a while too.
@Elisha – sorry to say, but, blogging about this *the day before* is hardly good marketing. You didn’t even give your community a heads up so we could help you promote the event. I’ll tweet and share this now, but a little more time to help promote the event would have been prudent, I think. Like Charlie, I had no idea (until he mentioned it).
@Shawn – CFB3 is an improvement over CFB2 for some of those sticking points like code highlighting, but yeah… it’s still not a terribly easy to use IDE overall. I’m using Sublime Text, which seems to work out well.
I am one of those Dreamweaver users for CF. CFB doesn’t highlight code very well. Leaves things unhighlighted. This is one way I envy Visual Studio. It would be nice to have a high quality IDE.
@Charlie Arehart
I’ve blogged on tomorrow’s eSeminar
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/post.cfm/adobe-coldfusion-2016-eseminar-thursday-march-3rd-9am-pst
@kishore As one of the great supporters from the Macromedia times is sad and disappointing to see Brazil without any support in the case of ColdFusion
I will send an email and try to summarize as much as possible on the situation in Brazil.
@Dawes (#29) – let me try and address a couple of your questions…
ColdFusion is an enterprise product for Adobe. None of the enterprise products Adobe has are listed on, or anywhere near, the front page. All of them are difficult to find on Adobe’s site. Adobe is a large org with lots of products – they have had to prioritize their money makers (e.g. CC) – regardless of what or when enterprise software they own is released. I’ve long since argued that Adobe should have their own enterprise site where they can promote those products, but marketing dollars are scarce and the focus continues to be on their flagship products. It’s not personal, and it’s not because they hate CF… it’s just business.
ColdFusion is not used in CC demo’s because, frankly, it has zero correlation to any of the CC products, including Dreamweaver (which I’ll discuss more in a moment). There is no place for ACF within the CC product line – ACF stands apart from the target market CC is built for.
ColdFusion has been used, and continues to be used, by Adobe in some places… the bugbase, for example, still runs on ColdFusion. The user groups site (which is apparently just down altogether now) used to run on ColdFusion. The problem is that this software was never maintained after Adobe lost all of it’s in-house ColdFusion developer talent (and despite best efforts by the community to help with that, Adobe opted out of eating their own dog food).
ColdFusion, along with ASP and other server-side languages, except PHP, were removed from Dreamweaver because Adobe, rightfully, wanted to focus Dreamweaver on a much larger target audience – primarily client side developers. CF Builder took over where Dreamweaver left off for server-side development of ColdFusion. You may not like CF Builder, I know I don’t, but that doesn’t change the fact that Dreamweaver support of CFML was hindering that product’s perception in the larger marketplace (and also the sole reason PHP support was left in, and even improved upon in later releases). Again, it’s just business… did they upset a handful of folks by doing that? Yes. Did they force those comfortable with Dreamweaver to either migrate to another developer tool or try and hack Dreamweaver to still support CF? Yes. Did they gain a whole slew of new customers by dropping support for a handful of CF devs? Yes.
As for building extensions… http://www.adobe.com/devnet/creativesuite/cs-extension-builder.html
Would like a VP of marketing/CEO explanation why CF wasn’t on the front page for a new release on release day. EVERY other tech company would have done this.
Also would like to know why ColdFusion is not used for adobe demos for CC. Aaron Conran at Sencha used to use it for Sencha demos, but no-one at Adobe uses cf backends for any of their web services? In fact Sencha training courses up to version 4.0 used cf as the webservices, but Adobe can’t even use it anywhere. (they are embarrassed Ive been told)
why is it not used for Adobe demos. the PERFECT use case for cc.
Also why was CF support ‘turned off’ on dreamweaver when it could ‘simply’ be turned back on. The ‘state of cf’ showed almost as many people use Dreamweaver as CF Builder, so why turn support for cfc’s and cfm pages was removed? There is a basic hack we all use to get cfc and cfm color coding working, but it would take minutes to add the ability for the default doc to be cfc or cfm to be added back in and not to have to use cfscript tags on components (it’s so annoying, but so simple to fix).
can you please explain why dreamweaver can’t have cfm/cfml document support? (explain the politics at least about why not, rather than say use cf build – which I will never use as it’s crap) – not that there’s any decent documentation on how to build a dreamweaver extension for CC anywhere on the planet.
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what is your marketing plan for GCC (middle east) ?
Thanks @Charlie (#24) – This is the first I’ve heard of this as well.
@CFTofinha, I would reach out to you to see to talk you about the Brazil situation.
@Shawn, I like the idea. Let me see what we could do.
Another idea is to do a BizSpark (Microsoft’s version) like incentive program, that enables companies that want to engage in new ventures with CF the opportunity to do so cost free over a period of time. Obviously their goal is to retain them long term once they are hooked. Its a very effective approach if you can afford to offer it.
A few things may be different:
-CF is easy enough to learn that you probably only need to offer 2 years, not 3 like they do.
-Visual Studio and the Azure services are the main value to Bizspark and Adobe doesn’t have much of value in either realm, so I would suggest they offer production licenses for free to give the program value. Such as free use for 2 years (no restrictions), but then the product expires and stops working after that period. Make it require online activation and check-ins to enforce it.
Lets face it… who is really going to use CF for free for 30 days? Nobody is going to build something meaningful to send to production with 30 days. And I’m sure you’ll say something like “the free trial is our top lead source”. No, your product software download is your top lead source. 99.99% of people downloading the product could care less about its free trial feature.
I agree with many comments here. In Brazil, the Adobe abandoned ColdFusion.
Many government agencies were using ColdFusion. Now virtually none.
Adobe Brazil was the major culprit. Not honored the community, their evangelists, there are no more CFUGs.
lol… wrong thread! Please ignore my last comment.
2000 is pretty impressive, although I’m wondering if equal number of more switched to other technologies.
+1 to @Shawn’s comment for adding full time resources to manage not only the website, but also adding any needed resources to properly manage all aspects of the product!
With regard to the roadmap, I’ve been disappointed with the last two releases. CF10 is still the best release IMHO, with no compelling reason to migrate up. Feels like the rest of the community agrees. I’ve not seen any reports on conversion, but I’d love to. Are the roadmap decisions being made in a vacuum? Not sure who the product manager is, but feels like they’re out of touch.
This may seem minor but you should always announce the dates of the next conference at the end of the current conference. For those of us traveling from far, we need a lot of time to get ourselves organized.
For example, this is the first time I see that CFSUmmit this year is October 10-11th.
The official link to the site, https://cfsummit.adobeevents.com/, still lists the 2015 event. As that is the only Adobe hosted event, the person responsible really needs to keep us to date.
I recommend you staff a full time web developer on your marketing team, rather than expect to pull those resources from Adobe global marketing, who will never give you enough support to accomplish these things. You certainly have enough on deck to keep that person busy. Either that or contract it out. To have zero budget for such an important thing for a product making 20k new customers a year with a solid base seems out of place.
In my experience this is not uncommon to do so. I’ve worked with several products that are given similar terms and they don’t settle on those allocations. They aggressively put resources in place to extend their marketing reach and be more agile.
I said these are some of the measures. Would update on the other activities later.
So basically your marketing strategy continues to be “preach to the choir”?
@Shawn, We are working on re-skinning the blog. Would see how fast we could do it. Your idea of coldfusion.com is good but it would just mean maintaining too many web properties. If we have extra resources we would definitely look into it.
@Chris, the team has gone over the topics that you suggested, We would update this thread on what we could blog about. Also we could take this to our Champions team to see what they think about it.
@Lance, thanks for your appreciation.
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There are some great suggestions here already. I agree strongly with:
@Shawn’s mention of CF practically vanishing from Adobe’s site. Even if you are specifically looking for it, you often have to drill down through a few pages to find any mention of anything ColdFusion related. Whatever their reason for this might be, it gives off the impression that they are embarrassed of CF.
@ChrisGeirman makes an extremely valid point about having ColdFusion play nicely/easily with modern frameworks. You would think that a combination of server-side CF and client-side Angular/React/Ember would make the internet a luscious place to be, but the experience of getting those kinds of technologies to work together ranges from “pulling teeth” to “time to consider sepuku” and then I’m right back to writing my own custom AJAX.
My own thing to add, piggy-backing off the mentions of better tutorials and training that have already popped up, is a revamp of the “livedocs” CFML reference pages. We are advocates for a crazy powerful language designed specifically for interactive web experiences, and yet going through the livedocs has all the UX of a mid ’90s PDF. A couple of ideas off the top of my head: What about Search As You Type? Being able to open/pin several Functions or Tags to a sidebar instead of having to have each open in a separate browser tab? Having the hyperlinks to other functions tooltip’ed with the relevant syntax data would probably even save me a click half the time. There is so much that can be done to make the reference faster and more user friendly to work with, while at the same time showing off the cool stuff a little creative CF/Javascript can do.
Anyway, just throwing a few more thoughts out there into the ether, lets see where they fly.
-Arthur
I think everyone’s suggestions so far are fantastic.
@Shawn’s suggestion of rebooting he WACK series–agree 100%. AND, getting better online tutorials in places like Nettuts, Lynda, and Pluralsight/Codeschool to name a few.
I miss the days of the evangelists! Bring back the Ben Fortas and the Ray Camdens! We need advocates for the community–familiar faces that we know and trust (like Charlie Arehart). Sounds like you’re trying to work on that with the “champions”. Great!
I’ll post more ideas as I think of them.
Thanks for the hard work. I don’t think you guys hear that enough from the community.
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To regain the interest of the community and also get new eyeballs looking at CF, we need a steady flood of high quality content that marries CF to newer technologies in ways that make sense. Technologies such as GraphQL, React, React Native, Relay, Redux, Angular 2, Node, Falcor, RethinkDB, RabbitMQ, Cycle, Elm, AWS, Meteor, Native Script, etc. In many of these cases, it may not make sense to marry CF to the technology as there’s no value add, but where there is… Write about it because that would be exciting stuff!
Here’s a few articles ID like to read…
* GraphQL Integration for ColdFusion
* Redux Unidirectional Architecture for ColdFusion
* 5 Ways to make your ColdFusion apps more Reactive
You get the point. Getting these articles out through popular newsletters, blog, and other popular channels would bring fresh attention to the platform.
Also, we need high quality tutorials on sites like nettuts, front-end masters, egghead, etc.
A bug tracker with lower friction, better responses, and one that actually works would be nice too.
@James did you check coldfusion slack?
seem you missed it
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/post.cfm/adobe-coldfusion-slack-channel
Better thank forums.
Australasia region forum.
Team, is there any ColdFusion forum or conference is the Austalia, Pacific or SE Asia region?
So beyond licensing and directly on marketing you already know my thoughts on it, but to get the conversation moving. This list is mostly for customer retention not customer growth.
I think CF MUST have a central and robust community at coldfusion.com. That one stop place for all things CF. Without it CF will not be able to establish itself organically and for many websites that is the main traffic source for new leads. Obviously such a community also provides existing developer benefits as well.
Everything Adobe does needs to have professional appeal. This blog really needs to be reskinned. Looks cheap and does not create consumer confidence.
Most people also want to see Adobe back the product more on Adobe.com. Every menu and product design, CF gets buried deeper and deeper on the site. Maybe people wouldn’t care as much if coldfusion.com was a robust product and community site, but right now it’s a redirect and there are no easy links on Adobe.com.
Ebooks… It’s got to be a little scary to invest in a language with ebooks published in the last 5 years. I downloaded the PDF file that barely anyone knows about, but it’s not as good as the WACK series. Maybe your champions can reboot the series?
Good stuff, thanks.
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