Adobe’s Collaborative Platforms

There has been a bit of confusion around which one of Adobe’s collaborative platforms offers or will offer certain features. In particular many people have asked if a developer always needs to rely on a hosted service such as Stratus or Lifecycle Collaboration Service (aka AFCS aka Cocomo) when wanting to use the new RTMFP protocol which will deliver (partly is delivering already) new and exciting features to the Flash Player.

To clear thing up, Kevin Towes, FMS Product Manager at Adobe, just posted the following information to the FlashMedia List:

STRATUS – this will always be ahead of the curve, providing a way to help us roll out new features that are in Flash player, before we can have a server offering. The service is and will remain as a free non-commercial service from Adobe. This service is not FMS, and has no ability for Server side scripting, or customization.

AFCS/LIVECYCLE COLLABORATION SERVICE – this will be a commercial option for customers interested in building a business that includes RTMFP. We introduced a pricing model, and it has support for the features found inside Stratus 1.0 (supporting Flash player 10.0). Key advantage with this service is the framework, which is an option for developers to get started, and leverage RTMFP to RTMP failover technology. You still will not have access to server side scripting, but there are lots of APIs in the framework to get you going. The goal for this service is to provide developers an option to bring this technology into your solution.

FLASH MEDIA SERVER – we have not announced any new version of FMS yet that will support RTMFP. We did hint yesterday that we’ll be updating FMS3.5 to version 3.5.3 later this year to support the new FP 10.1 features – and in a future version after that release – FMS may be one of your options to host a local service to build your own P2P applications – including introductions, and supporting server side programming.

Thanks Kevin, I think this clears things up somewhat.

Topics: Adobe, AFCS, Flash, Programming, RTMFP protocol