Back on March 28th I led a free talk at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts titled Getting Ready for CS3, Leopard & New Macs.

We cautiously recommended most studios hold back a couple months before upgrading to Creative Suite 3 — and I promised we’d run a tip in the beginning of June 2007 with our experiences supporting CS3 in real-world environments. This is that tip.

The short anticlimactic answer: Yes, upgrade to CS3.

In the last several months we’ve been supporting a wide number of creative studios who chose an early upgrade to CS3. So far we’ve seen limited problems caused by that upgrade, and we continue to hear good feedback from our clients who have upgrade to CS3.

If you have an Intel-based Macs, CS3 is a must. The new CS3 applications are significantly faster on Intel Macs than their predecessors. In addition, Illustrator CS3 and InDesign CS3 solve specific crashes that plagued the older CS2 versions on Intel Macs.

Some bugs.

There are a number of small bugs regarding the new Illustrator color swatches, certain Photoshop layer operations, some issues with Bridge in certain server environments, and import of older InDesign CS files according to the vast army of nitpickers on message boards and forums sites.

Despite the occasional bug, we recommend CS3, and expect most of the inconveniences will iron themselves out with minor updates (some of which Adobe has already issued).

No Font Auto-Activation plug-ins for CS3 yet.

The most common complaint we’ve heard from clients using Adobe CS3 is in the area of font management. Font Agent Pro and Extensis Suitcase have not yet released CS3-compatible auto-activation plug-ins for most of the new CS3 applications.

Note: Earlier this month, Extensis did release a Suitcase Fusion auto-activation plug-in for Illustrator CS3. Available here.

Some Acrobat Pro 8 workflow glitches.

Another frequent complaint we’ve heard from early-adopter clients has been with the new Acrobat Pro 8 causing glitches with existing workflow. Installing Acrobat Pro 8 on top of existing version 7 installations has required some additional troubleshooting.

Source: Come to SVC’s free talk: Should You Upgrade to Adobe CS3? There are two free talks scheduled: June 13th at noon, and June 14th at 6:30 p.m.