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.