Adobe CreatePDF: The Online Electronic Stapler

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Rebecca Staley | Comments (1)

By this time, let’s assume that you’ve already gone to see what all the fuss is about over Adobe CreatePDF. (What’s that? You haven’t seen it yet? You rascal! Read no further and hustle over there now! And then come back and read the rest of this post.) Even if you still haven’t seen the works over at CreatePDF, you can probably guess that the service is primarily for – well, creating PDF files. CreatePDF can certainly do that, and can do it well, if we do say so ourselves. Did you know, however, that there’s more?

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Thank you – Your Ideas Made a Difference

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Lisa Underkoffler | Comments (0)

The Team here at Acrobat.com sends you all a big thank you for the ideas, comments, and votes. The old Africa proverb says “It Takes a Village.” In our case, it takes a community of interested, bright users to help make Acrobat.com even better.

The Acrobat.com Ideas site has been up for almost 2 years and we’ve valued all of your input. At last count, about 60 ideas made their way into the services. The ideas ranged from small (but important) tweaks to an entirely new product – Tables.

At the end of November, the Ideas site will be taking a break. But please, keep those ideas coming. You can always send us feedback or go to the Acrobat.com forums:

Forum for Acrobat.com Ideas

Forum for CreatePDF Ideas

Forum for SendNow Ideas

Again, many thanks to the many contributors.

PS: We’d also like to thank our partner, BrightIdea, who provided the WebStorm software, and for their invaluable guidance.

The Gift of Hassle-Free Sending: A special post from Product Manager Amy Wang

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Rebecca Staley | Comments (0)

We are so pleased to hand today’s blog entry over to one of our Product Managers here at Acrobat.com: Amy Wang is here to speak with us about Adobe SendNow from the perspective of a product manager. Read on, and enjoy! Thanks for the insights, Amy.

With Adobe SendNow, our goal is to provide a hassle-free way to get files from one place to another securely and reliably from wherever you are.

Amy Wang, SendNow Product Manager

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Why you shouldn’t use email to exchange documents

Posted on November 24, 2010 by Rebecca Staley | Comments (2)

Think back to the last time you were working with a coworker to put together a project (or a presentation or a report). She had raw data to send to you; you had to get some charts to her; she suddenly remembered that she had to send you the transcripts for an interview; and then you almost forgot to send her the sample images from the photo shoot.

Let’s stop here for a moment and count the number of emails that this has already required of you both: four different emails, full of content and heavy attachments. Consider the scope of this project if you add one person to the team; now add another. What if the report has to include summaries of previous reports? Do you still have the emails (and attachments) from two months ago? “Well,” you say, “let me just go into my inbox and search around for two or three hours to find the right attachments and make sure they’re the right versions of the files.” Maybe you’re incurring the sort of rage that spawns blog articles like this one. What if you’re emailing files to someone who uses a filter to block attachments?

No thanks. But what if you were using Adobe SendNow? (Cue the collective sigh of relief.)

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“Extraordinary PDF files instead of ordinary ones” – Acrobatix on CreatePDF

Posted on November 15, 2010 by Ali Hanyaloglu | Comments (0)

David Mankin – trainer, blogger, community member and Adobe Certified Expert – recently wrote a very nice summary of the new Adobe CreatePDF online service on his Acrobatix! blog. In the article, David gives an overview of the new services, what you can do with them, and a nice use case for CreatePDF, one that’s applicable even if you are already using Acrobat desktop software.

Now suppose you are away from your computer, and you find yourself at someone else’s machine, or you have a PC that does NOT have Acrobat Professional installed. You need to produce a PDF on the spot, but without your Adobe PDF print driver at hand, you’re stuck. .. or are you?…….I believe this is more than reasonable if you will be at various computers throughout your schedule, and Acrobat Pro is not always at hand. Remember, you can log in to the service from ANY machine with web access and a browser!

Thanks for a nice write-up, David! And if you aren’t doing so already, I strongly suggest checking out the great Acrobat and Acrobat.com tips on David’s blog.

Behind the Scenes with the Acrobat.com Product Management Team

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Ali Hanyaloglu | Comments (0)

We recently managed to get Amy Wang, Senior Product Manager and Rick Treitman, Director of Product Management, to step away from their desks and instead get in front of an HD camera and share with us all their views on working in the cloud and why we offer these set of useful online services.

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Wait a Minute, Mister Postman! (A guide to sending large files with Adobe SendNow)

Posted on November 9, 2010 by Rebecca Staley | Comments (0)

We hate to toot our own horn here, but if our horn were a 2 GB file, we’d want to toot it with Adobe SendNow. SendNow is Acrobat.com’s new platform for transferring files from one place to another without clogging inboxes or sending extraneous messages back and forth to check on the status of a sent file. Now with a one-stop landing, you can find all of your sent and received files in one place, and track the progress of your active files. Here’s a collection of our favorite features.

This is what the delivery receipt email looks like.

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Premium services now available around the world!

Posted on November 8, 2010 by Rebecca Staley | Comments (0)

This moment has been a long time coming, and we know how patiently people all over the world have waited for it. We’re very happy to announce that it’s not only our two new services SendNow and CreatePDF that were rolled out last week; now, Acrobat.com users around the world—in Germany! France! Brazil! Singapore!—are able to purchase premium subscriptions to Acrobat.com, SendNow, and CreatePDF. This means that the global community may now conduct ConnectNow meetings with up to 20 participants, create unlimited PDF files, and send and track files of up to 2GB in size—and do much, much more.

The services are available wherever there is an Adobe online store (with the exception of Japan, Korea, and Russia), so to get started, head over to the Adobe store selector and choose your country from the list. Happy collaborating! And thank you for waiting so patiently.

For information on these services and how to purchase them, please see the following pages:

http://acrobat.com/pricing.html

http://sendnow.acrobat.com/pricing.html

http://createpdf.acrobat.com/pricing.html

New Online Services at Acrobat.com Now Available!

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Rebecca Staley | Comments (1)

Ladies and gentlemen, the moment we’ve all been waiting for…

Our new Adobe SendNow and CreatePDF online services are now live!

For all of you who have struggled in vain to send each other emails with cumbersome file attachments; for all of you who have been wishing for an easy way to not just create but also combine high-quality PDF files; and for all of you who have read our teaser posts on SendNow and CreatePDF…THEY’RE HERE! Starting today, when you go to the home pages for Acrobat.com, SendNow or CreatePDF, you’ll have these new services at your fingertips for sending those pesky large files to anyone with a valid email address, and for creating and combining PDF files quickly and easily.

We’ll post more details about these services very soon; but right now, we’d like you to read more about their release over on the Acrobat team blog while we go download the CreatePDF desktop printer and send and track a bunch of files (just because we know how fantastic it is to do so in such an easy way). Otherwise, run – don’t walk – over to the Acrobat.com, SendNow or CreatePDF home pages and get all the details on what these new technologies can do for you.

Adobe MAX 2010: More From Day 2 and Day 3

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Ali Hanyaloglu | Comments (0)

Another year, another MAX, another few days of meeting and talking to customers, partners and co-workers about all the fantastic things they do with Adobe technology, and indeed, the challenges they face in what they do. One of my favorite things about my work is sitting down with a customer and brainstorming with them on how Adobe technology might be able to help them get their work done, including showing the new services at Adobe SendNow. Or in the case of one individual, impress her boss!

Another customer I spoke to already had a PDF-based “workflow” in place for collecting edits on documents and artwork from colleagues. The only issue – those colleagues were using Acrobat to edit the actual text in the PDF files! Although Acrobat is capable of doing that, sometimes you need to use the right tool for the right job, and in this case editing the actual text wasn’t the best option, as it becomes difficult to identify who had changed what, and if there was a major text edit, doing so may change the design too.

Instead, I suggested she try two things. One was to use the commenting tools in Acrobat (and Adobe Reader when enabled for commenting) and collect the comments from others by using Shared Reviews with Acrobat.com: IT resources were limited and unable to help with setting up servers and access controls – Acrobat.com to the rescue there!

Secondly, if all they wanted was to allow people to edit the text of the document, I suggested using Adobe Buzzword to allow others to collaboratively author and comment on the copy. Then when it was ready, they could easily place the final copy in to their Adobe InDesign CS5 layouts, convert the document to a high-quality PDF file, and send out for Shared Review as described above.

The response to those suggestions to use Acrobat.com with Acrobat? That they were sure to make many people in her company very happy. Sweet!

It’s been a great week at MAX for the Acrobat Solutions team and Adobe. For those of you that were there, THANK YOU! You will be able to watch the recordings of the sessions and keynotes on Adobe TV.