Some good news for creative teams in South Africa: Adobe has announced that its Creative Cloud offering for teams is now locally available. The announcement comes in the wake of Creative Cloud for individuals similarly being made available to South African users last month.

Creative Cloud for teams, as the name suggests, is particularly focused on multi-user collaboration. Along with the same features found in Creative Cloud for personal use, such as the desktop tools, online services for publishing and file sharing, access to upgrades and feature updates when they are released, the team cloud product brings a few special features of its own to the mix.

These include easy management of virtual workgroups, 100 GB of cloud storage per user (versus 20 GB for the individual Creative Cloud offering), and expert support services. Also on offer is centralised administration of the offering which enables businesses to quickly and easily cater to new users, along with centralised billing and efficient license management.

Flurry of features

That, however, is not all that Creative Cloud for teams can boast. Users can further take advantage of Creative Cloud Connection, a desktop sync app which allows users to automatically sync files to a Creative Cloud account by saving files to their desktop folder, or by dragging and dropping, something we suspect will be familiar to anyone who has used Dropbox.

Additionally, according to Adobe, Creative Cloud Training has also been made available to paid Creative Cloud members. This offers an extensive library of tutorials and trial courses from the company’s training partners such as Kelby Training, video2brain and Attain.

According to Grant O’Connor, Adobe’s regional manager for sub Saharan Africa and Israel, the new offering will make it easier for customers to have access to the latest Adobe software at a lower cost. He added that it will “enable the company to provide the ongoing value that its customers have come to expect from Adobe.”

The tablet imperative

Perhaps the most evident example of this is the fact that Creative Cloud includes Digital Publishing Suite (DPS), Single Edition. This directly takes into account the growth of publishing for tablets, as DPS is intended to simplify the mobile app development process by enabling designers to create and deliver digital publications to iPad through the Apple App Store, without writing any code.

The company elaborated that with DPS, Single Edition members can create single-issue content, including brochures, catalogues or personal design portfolios, and submit an unlimited number of apps to the Apple App Store for publication, at no additional cost. 

 

This, it explained, gives freelance designers, design agencies and small-to-midsize businesses easy access to the same core digital publishing technologies that leading publishers worldwide are using.

To the point

The one strange aspect of the announcement is that pricing is still in US dollars. Creative Cloud for teams is priced from $70 (R630) per month per ‘seat’ (user), with an annual contract required.