Adobe Acrobat.com Ideas & BrightIdea are finalists in the Forrester Groundswell Awards. We're delighted on several levels. The Ideas site has contributed a lot of great ideas, inspiration and the site has helped us in setting priorities for the upcoming release of Acrobat.com. And, it's great to be voted a finalist for the Forrester Research award. The Acrobat.com Ideas site is powered by Brightidea's Webstorm technology.
In a conversation with one of the Adobe staff in the UK, an inspiring although not surprising story was told. He works frequently with a number of departments in the UK Government, and knows quite well that it is typically a long process when updating any sort of policy or procedure, even for minor updates. And so, here's the story... and perhaps a good example for others who may find themselves in the same position.
Adobe made some recent changes which resulted in a decline in customer service quality. We know that some of you have been impacted as you have contacted us via our forums, feedback email alias, and twitter. The product team is working hard to make sure your issues get resolved. We are responding to you directly and escalating your issues as necessary. We are also working closely with the support team to improve the quality of support you receive.
We wanted to share a letter from the VP of Customer Service, acknowledging and apologizing for the situation at hand.
Open Letter to Adobe Customers
Recently, however, our customers have experienced a level of service that is inconsistent with what they expect and deserve. This is unacceptable to us and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused some of our customers. We are working diligently - in fact, teams are working around the clock - to resolve these issues. I'd like to thank all our customers who are sharing feedback and giving us the opportunity to respond. We appreciate your loyalty, support and willingness to make your concerns heard.
Meet Erik Larson the visionary leader behind Acrobat.com. We at Adobe have embraced Acrobat.com because it makes us more competitive and just makes work more enjoyable. Erik will share how Acrobat.com provides a fundamentally different and better way to work through stories and real-world examples. Come hear about the future of Acrobat.com and the vision behind the product. This will be an interactive session; Bring your questions and thoughts.
Today we take a big step towards realizing our vision of a new way to work on Acrobat.com.
Today we end the public beta for Acrobat.com. We launch Acrobat.com Premium subscriptions for more intensive business use (yes, the free version of the service is still available, and still free :-). And we give a look into the future of Acrobat.com for the coming year, starting with the unveiling of our spreadsheet product, Acrobat.com Tables, on our Labs website. Lots of news! Oh, plus two weeks ago we released Acrobat.com Presentations.
Announcing today - Tables on Acrobat.com Labs. Tables is the most recent addition to Acrobat.com, and joins Presentations and Buzzword. And it's pretty amazing, if we do say so ourselves. Check it out: http://labs.acrobat.com. And don't miss the Crash Course. You'll see what we mean when you open your first table.
It's not that we are smarter or more creative. It's not because we like each other more. It's because we've found a new way to work.
We get more work done, much better than your team, in much less time, because we use Acrobat.com.
And from a personal standpoint, by working this way I get fewer emails and spend less time in meetings, yet I get more done, have more time to think, and enjoy my work and my co-workers more. How does that sound to you?
Let me give you a real world example of how this happens.
Today we announced Acrobat.com Presentations, a new beta service on http://labs.acrobat.com. Imagine the beauty, power and collaboration of Buzzword, only for presentations. I think Anthony Ha at Venture Beat said it pretty well in the first blog posting we saw in the wild, “...there’s a solid core for Adobe to build around…genuinely beautiful…the key feature of Acrobat.com is the collaboration it allows…”
You asked. We listened. Today, we're announcing Acrobat.com Presentations.
This is a Labs Preview of our latest application - Presentations. It's an exciting, new product and we want you to give it a spin!
Our new presentation tool joins Buzzword in the growing ranks of our online collaborative offerings. You can try the public beta version on our labs site (http://labs.acrobat.com). If you already have an Acrobat.com account, you can just sign in. Or, there's free sign up for new users.
Will social networking and instant messages replace the standard business phone call, the client lunch and the handshake? The Acrobat.com team recently completed a survey with Directions Research, Inc. that points toward an evolution in office workplace culture, including the changing ways white-collar workers are interacting and coordinating their tasks, and how business will be conducted in the social media-rich environment of the 21st century.
I was one of those 6th grade nerds in the AV corps. We were the guys who got to run the projectors or show the filmstrips. We'd wheel the equipment around the school and feel quite important because we knew stuff the teachers didn't - like how to thread a 16mm projector or splice a film. But there was always a projector bulb or a fuse blown that would sabotage our efforts. And it seems like even today, even with our technology advances, there's always a glitch that gets in the way of our best-laid plans.
There has been some commentary about SharePoint over the past couple weeks that helps mark the path we are taking with Acrobat.com, so I thought I would weigh in.
To some extent, Acrobat.com owes its success so far to the SharePoint story. No, we don't use SharePoint, and we don't directly integrate with it either (maybe someday). But SharePoint has introduced people to the promise of better collaboration, or as Thomas Vander Wal said, it is acting as the "gateway drug to enterprise social tools." And at the same time it has opened up an opportunity for Acrobat.com to actually deliver on the promise of better social collaboration at work without the pitfalls that Dion Hinchcliffe recently described as "the issues and challenges of using SharePoint for Enterprise 2.0."
A recent survey we did of Acrobat.com users highlighted the gap between the big promises and meager payoffs of Enterprise 2.0 so far. I think this is the most interesting statistic:
There are as many people who have stopped using SharePoint for sharing and collaborating on documents as there are people currently using it.
It doesn't take long to see the difference between where Google is coming from and where we are going with Acrobat.com. This tweet from a few weeks ago is one pithy perspective:
"I must admit Adobe's Buzzword looks like creamy, fattening butter next to trim, healthy margarine GDocs. But I like butter..." - @mahyuni
I love seeing that sort of emotional response to Buzzword and Acrobat.com. At the risk of dangerously mixing saturated fat and cardiac metaphors, I think the reason people respond so deeply to Acrobat.com, even in its early "unfinished" stage, is that we believe great designs engage both hearts and minds.
Acrobat.com is growing like gang busters, with over 100,000 new people signing up each week. This is happening even though we are still in beta and have a long way to go before the product is "done." Why is this happening, who is using online collaboration to change the way people work together, and what we are doing to make Acrobat.com the best choice out there?
First let me set some context, using a picture from the early 1830s. I first saw a similar picture in a business history class with Professor Richard Tedlow:
From wikipedia:
"The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations ... is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group."
The Acrobat.com Ideas site (http://ideas.acrobat.com) is available now for YOUR ideas, your comments and, very importantly, your VOTES. This is an experiment for us: a new way of gathering ideas, getting feedback on the ideas, and letting you tell us which are the ideas most important to you. Will this be effective? Inspirational? Yes. Absolutely. Please help us explore by adding your ideas. And vote early and often.
You have to send a sales proposal to a client to meet a deadline. You do all the work, compile all the necessary documents together and package them up and send it via e-mail well before the set deadline. However unbeknownst to you, your recipients e-mail server limits the size of e-mail attachments and your attachments is removed by the server. All your hard work does not make it to the intended recipients and as a result you miss the deadline.
Is this scenario familiar?
Good News! Acrobat.com now provides a Plugin for Microsoft Outlook 2007 for easily, securely and reliably sharing documents from your desktop e-mail client by making it as easy as adding an attachment. Try it for yourself.
Screen sharing is one of the most, if not the most, important features of online meetings and something we continue to improve upon. We are excited to share with you the following ConnectNow screen sharing enhancements we've made based on your feedback.
Faster Screen Sharing. Some of you told us you were experiencing screen sharing delays when sharing with lower bandwidth or slow Internet connections. To improve the performance of screen sharing in these circumstances, we tuned our screen sharing algorithm so it transmits data more efficiently. The first time you enter your meeting room you will be asked to download the new add-in with improved screen sharing. You now have the option to optimize screen sharing for faster performance or for higher quality, with the default set to faster performance. You can change your screen sharing setting to higher quality by going to the meeting menu, selecting preferences, then screen share, then enable "high fidelity".
We're pleased to announce that Share, Buzzword, and ConnectNow have new Help systems. Help now includes the following additional features:
• Search (within both the product and community content). A tip in all services explains how to get the best search results.
• PDFs for each Help service. Click the link at the top right of any page to download the PDF.
• New navigation. Click links in the table of contents or within long articles to jump to specific topics. Use page forward and backward icons to page through the content. Click links in the upper left to open another Help system.
• Survey links on each page. This unique survey for each service will help Adobe improve the Help content.
We're pleased to report that the newly announced Creative Suite will add collaboration capabilities offered by Acrobat.com.
Creative professionals will be able to work with others in real time using ConnectNow without leaving the Creative Suite 4 workspace and with no need for IT support or a company-wide web conferencing solution.
You can now access your ConnectNow meeting room directly from within CS4 applications to meet live over the web to share your screen, present creative concepts and ideas, and brainstorm with up to two online guests for no additional service charge. To share your screen with colleagues and clients from within most Creative Suite 4 products, choose File > Share My Screen. Guests can then see your desktop on their screens as you work. You can exchange ideas using the chat pod, add a live video or audio feed, or use the Whiteboard feature to enable guests to comment on content. You can even temporarily hand over control of the screen to a guest to collaborate on a file.
As an added convenience, Acrobat.com on Adobe AIR will be included with most of the Creative Suites, so you can launch ConnectNow from your desktop and use other Acrobat.com services including convenient file upload, storage and sharing of large files.
This post looks at some of the ways in which PDF files can be used with Acrobat.com. In addition to offering the ability to create five PDFs, there are a number of ways that Acrobat.com helps you work with PDF files.
At a recent education conference, it was gratifying to hear several stories from Acrobat.com users, detailing how they use our applications to work together more effectively.
One of the common threads was the degree to which Acrobat.com enabled the workflow required in developing electronic materials. This was a pleasant surprise to hear - as you've probably seen, we focus quite a bit on collaboration. However, we have not yet explicitly developed capabilities that facilitate workflow. This would include things like mapping out the steps in a process, assigning tasks based on roles, supporting complete annotation of the process throughout, etc.
(This entry is authored by Ruchi Kumar, a graduate student at the School of Information at UC Berkeley, working as a business systems analyst here at Adobe for a summer internship.)
So who does the Acrobat.com services benefit? One possible scenario is for students at grad schools (like me!). Many courses are project oriented with typical team sizes of 3-4 people. This brings up the scheduling issue - with everyone having their own busy schedules and priorities, it gets difficult to setup a time and space where all can physically meet. In the past, we were forced to juggle with a wide range of collaboration tools to solve these concerns.
Today's Workplace Challenges
These days it's becoming much more common for people to work with other people who aren't in the same location. There are many challenges that come with this. You no longer have the luxury of walking over to someone's office or cube and having a face-to-face conversation. You no longer have team meetings in the same room where you can gauge people's reactions to what you are saying, see if they are following along, or brainstorm new ideas on a white board. You can't help feeling one step removed from the people you are meeting with when all you hear is their voice and try to follow along with what people are talking about.
So what can you do to improve the quality of your day-to-day interactions and meetings? That's where using web conferencing comes in. It can dramatically improve your meetings and ad hoc collaboration by providing a visual representation of what you are talking about, bring the physical presence of the people to the meeting with web cams, and provide a place to capture meeting notes, share files and brainstorm ideas. With ConnectNow, web conferencing is now accessible to anyone. It's free, sign up now!
If you've been following the Acrobat.com press, or reading our marketing materials, or checking our blog and forum, you've seen that we are very focused on enabling collaboration - especially when documents are involved. Here's a quick look at the ways we enable collaboration.
Collaboration in Authoring
The story begins with document authoring, and in Buzzword we've heard countless people indicate that Buzzword is the finest online writing experience currently available. Many have told us they've even abandoned Word - some use the expression "liberated" - in favor of Buzzword as their primary writing environment.
Buzzword is indeed a simple and elegant word processor, but it really differentiates from Word and other desktop applications when you want to collaborate with others in the writing process. Instead of pushing documents out to others via email, you simply invite your collaborators to the only instance of the document, online, where they can contribute content or just add comments.
With everyone working on the same document, rather than multiple, disparate copies of the document, then collaboration is smoother and you can keep track of everyone's involvement. The image below shows the Buzzword collaborator bar, which displays who has read the document, when they read it and which version they read. Now that's getting everyone on the same page!
