It has been an unusually busy week, both at work and things to do outside of work.

I attended an InDesign Melbourne Usergroup meeting on Tuesday (21 Aug), probably the biggest and most well run usergroup meeting I have been too all year. More than a 100 people attended (by my estimates), too many came so there was about a 40 min delay as everyone was registered. Many thanks to Noha Edell, Business Product Manager for InDesign, for coming and sharing the little quarks quirks of InDesign CS3 and what you have to do to get around them.

Also middle of the week saw the news of Flash having official support for the open source H.264 codec, and one would assume future H.26* revision which is good news for Flash/Flex community. I personally have not investigated enough into the support, but I hope this means Flash engineering team is trying to integrate native H.264 abilities into Flash which would accomplish what Silverlight has natively with VC-1.

Also somewhere along the week I realised that I may not have realised mentioned earlier that CF8 standard now comes with event/messaging gateway as well, albeit limited via the EFR, which was only available via CF7 Enterprise.

I also decided to get serious about picking up Flex, so I am going to start reading my two Flex books while waiting for, or travelling on, the train. Also decided it was time to have a CF site where I can pursue my projects (or extend others CF projects), and am shopping around for a CF web host based in Australia, but the usual problem of bandwidth pricing in Australia is frustrating to say the least.

I also started experimenting with the new feature set which interested me the most, which is the Exchange integration, which I must say is beautifully done, i.e. it works flawlessly… Though there is a little concern on security and the easy of use balance. To communicate with the exchange server, each thread/request needs to be opened with the user’s username and password, i.e. their Active Directory username and password, hence I need to find out what is the most practical way on storing this information and ensuring the security of the username and password, while not making it tedious to prompt for the password each time, for opening threads/request. If anyone wants to point me in the right direction it will be greatly appreciated! I will blog about possible solutions/considerations if and as they come to light.

Have a great week ahead!