I work at a small company where there are 6-8 regular users of Adobe InDesign CC (v. 9.2.2). Earlier this year we all installed it and upconverted the .indd files we were using from the last physical version we had, InDesign 6. This exercise seemed worth our time, because we understood that the CC .indd file format must be different from the 6 .indd file format. However, we also believed that this would mean our new "CC-friendly" .indd files would be future-compatible with all versions of InDesign Creative Cloud...
Last week we hired a new employee, he installed InDesign CC 2014 (v. 10.0.0), and began to work on some of our common project files. He followed all of the directions as he updated a few Books, and without realizing it, upconverted about a dozen InDesign Documents.
Now, all employees without InDesign CC 2014 cannot open any of the .indd files that he modified.
There are several reasons I believe this is a flaw in design and something the Adobe developers should seriously reconsider:
1) InDesign CC, by design, requires that any user be signed in to the CC server to verify that the user has an active license. If the user doesn't have an active license, or is signed out of their account, the program is uninstalled / doesn't work.
2) This means that breaking version compatibility between one version and the next (in this case between CC 9.2.2 and CC 10) is no longer necessary to prevent people from using InDesign files but not purchasing the latest version of your software! We pay monthly! If I -- and everyone on my team -- are paying the monthly fee, why should we be forced to upgrade our host of .indd files simply because a piece of code purposely breaks backwards compatibility with the .indd file format?
3) When advertised as a "cloud" solution, the interaction between local files, updates to the software, and all cross-compatibility should be seamless.
Because of this flaw, everyone on my team will now have to upgrade to 10.0.0, regardless of whether they have the time to do so or not, in order to continue to do our day-to-day jobs. And we will have to spend hours upconverting all of our documents. Upconverting is not an automatic, painless process. It requires manual intervention for each file in order to pick a location in which the file is to be saved.
My question is this: What are the developer reasons for creating this built-in obsolescence now that we are using the CC version? While the purpose during the days of physical media were understandable, if dubious, in my opinion this is a bad way to develop cloud-based software packages that require continuously active licenses.
I'm hopeful that some real discussion about this might get Adobe to re-think the way they develop future versions now that we are in this post-physical media software world.