My first Acrobat launch as product marketing director was an incredible experience. I was able to hear first-hand how customers saw their business success and how Acrobat plays an important role in helping them achieve their goals. In spite of the economy, wherever I went, the mood was generally optimistic. Customers were excited about the prospects for their businesses and were thinking and planning ahead.  But the biggest surprise for me during my travels around the globe was to hear the incredible passion that our customers have for our products and how they innovate. Here are the top three insights I learned along the way:

• Be transparent with customers – We wanted to be transparent and simply share more than we had before with customers what we were doing with the next version.  With that in mind, we briefed 1,200 customers on Acrobat X prior to the announcement. We involved the prerelease community, that included 3,100 participants, in the Acrobat X development process as early as possible. We kicked off the program in March 2010, starting with a small set of power users to test the early builds and provide their feedback. We asked these people to put Acrobat X through its paces, use it as if they were running their businesses on it.
• Building better products starts with users –  For Adobe, the prerelease program was an incredible opportunity to meet and understand our customer base first-hand. This was a great opportunity for the prerelease community to familiarize themselves with the new features and for the Acrobat team to jumpstart the feedback-soliciting process. The feedback we received from was incredibly valuable and ultimately helped us build a better product. I couldn’t have been more pleased and excited by the responses we received from our visits and the feedback from the prerelease program.   People are passionate about Acrobat and how they use it. Every day, people are using Acrobat to make their businesses run better.
• Quality vs. quantity in features – The new focused features we introduced in Acrobat X hit many of the pain points we uncovered during the months leading up to launch – better SharePoint integration; a smoother, leaner user interface; simpler content reuse; improved security to name a few. The new ActionsWizard, which simplifies multistep document preparation and publishing processes, was a big improvement because it let users automate frequently used Acrobat functions which reduces training and makes collaboration easier.

Looking ahead, how we work is changing and the technology to work differently needs to be available. Services will play a bigger role in bringing Acrobat to more people. The customers I met were excited by the prospect of making services like Adobe SendNow and CreatePDF available on a variety of devices.

Acrobat X has raised the bar for collaboration and sharing. In the New Year, we’ll continue to reach out to customers for feedback and insight into how they use Acrobat to help run their businesses and what we can do make it better. If you’d like to be part of the prerelease program, you can sign up here. Regardless, we’re always eager to hear from you.

Happy Holidays.

Cheers,

Mark Grilli, Director of Product Marketing, Acrobat Solutions

In case your head is spinning by the new features and capabilities in Acrobat X, we’ve just made your lives a lot easier!

Our fantastic Acrobat User Community experts have developed a series of Acrobat X Tips and Tricks videos in Adobe TV that walk you through not only the new tools, but also the cool, lesser-known capabilities that have been available since earlier Acrobat versions.

We don’t need to tell you that Acrobat isn’t just about converting to PDFs, and each video in this series discusses Acrobat’s richer capabilities like adding multimedia to PDFs, protecting your documents, creating customized “actions” and developing PDF Portfolios. For instance, our first video in the series, “Adding Rich Media to PDF Files,” shows you how to add Flash, video and sound in a PDF using the new Content panel in Acrobat X.

Whether you’re interested in creating forms, producing engaging marketing materials with PDF Portfolios and everything in between, stay tuned to @Acrobat for tweets featuring these Acrobat X Tips and Tricks videos!

Say you have a page in a PDF file that contains a large image with a white margin around it. What’s the easiest way to remove the white margin?

Keep sending us your answers via Twitter with #AcrobatContest in your message and follow us @Acrobat for winner information, news, tips, future contests and even some Acrobat tricks. Be sure to check out the contest requirements* for eligibility. Good luck!

We also wanted to give a special shout out to the winner of the second Twitter contest this week – @jamesfritz! He was the first person to correctly answer Wednesday’s question asking the quickest way for Acrobat to detect and add fill-able fields. Ready for the answer? Click on the create button, choose “create PDF form” and simply follow the wizard instructions.

* Please note that you can only win an @Acrobat Twitter contest (aka Tweetaway) once every six months. Valid for US residents only.

And then come back and read this blog post from Rebecca Staley, Acrobat.com Community Manager, who provides insight on all the nifty new features and uses for CreatePDF. So throw that traditional stapler away!

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? Read the full blog post here.

Now onto round two. Remember to submit your answer through Twitter by including the hash tag in your response, #AcrobatContest, to be eligible. You can also follow our Twitter handle @Acrobat to get the latest contest announcements and details. Today’s prize for the first correct tweet is a free year subscription to SendNow, Adobe’s new document exchange service! Just in time for all your end of the year files, photo collages and large projects.

Ready? Here’s the second question:

You have a PDF form open in Acrobat, but none of the fields are fill-able. What’s the quickest way for Acrobat to detect and add fill-able fields for you?

Keep those great answers coming via Twitter, and be sure to check back in on Friday (Dec. 17) for our final contest of the week. Good luck!

Every other day this week, we’ll post a question at @Acrobat about features and tools available in Acrobat X, and the first person to answer each question correctly via Twitter wins a prize. Our first prize for the winner will be a gift bag of Acrobat X and Adobe goodies.

Be sure to tag your response with the hash tag, #AcrobatContest, to be eligible, and follow our Twitter handle @Acrobat to get the latest contest announcements and details.

Ready? Here’s your first question:

What’s the fastest way to remove sensitive information (like all Social Security Numbers) from a PDF file?

Stay tuned on Wednesday (Dec. 15) and Friday (Dec. 17) for the next questions. Good luck!

Join Jessica Davis, senior product marketing manager for Reader, for an Adobe Presenter session, which discusses advancements in Adobe Reader X such as online services, Protected Mode in Reader X and mobile support.

Also, be sure to follow @Adobe_Reader for the latest Reader X news, and once you’re seasoned on the new version, download it here!

The prerelease community is involved in the Acrobat development process as early as possible. Acrobat X was no different, where we kicked off the program in March 2010, starting with a small set of power users to test the early builds and provide their feedback. As the development cycle progressed, we posted more beta builds and expanded the prerelease group substantially as we moved further along the cycle. We recruited and screened Acrobat beta participants through various channels – active participants from previous prerelease cycles, participants who applied via the Acrobat/Reader Interest Form, Adobe sales and marketing referrals and finally, referrals from existing prerelease testers. Prerelease participants were selected based on their credentials, interest areas and ability to contribute meaningfully to the feedback process.

At the close of the prerelease program, we had more than 3,000 participants who had signed up, close to 6,000 forum posts on the prerelease discussion forums and over 250 customer bugs that were fixed. We also conducted regular milestone surveys, and as Chris French mentions in his interview here, these surveys were instrumental in gauging our progress build over build, and taking corrective measures as necessary. Another significant feature of the Acrobat X prerelease was the deep-dive eSeminar series we held exclusively for the prerelease community. This was really a great opportunity for the prerelease community to familiarize themselves with the new features and for the Acrobat team to jumpstart the feedback-soliciting process.

For Adobe, the prerelease program has been an incredible opportunity to meet and understand its customer base first-hand, as well as have the product tested by real users in a real world environment. The feedback we received from our prerelease group was incredibly valuable and ultimately helped us build a better product. Whether it’s telling us about bugs that slip through our QE net, helping us prioritize which bugs to fix first by telling us what’s important to the user, discussing the completeness and ease of use of features we provide, or functionality users would like to see in future releases, each of the comments and suggestions was read carefully and considered.

Likewise for the prerelease participants, the program provided a platform to give feedback on the Acrobat feature set as it developed, to explore and evaluate all the new features and capabilities offered in Acrobat and Reader, to engage with other users in order to share ideas and best practices, to engage with the Acrobat team directly and understand why they developed the features they did and to learn how to use the new features earlier than others.

Douglas Hanna, a veteran beta tester for Acrobat, writes, “This prerelease is the first one I have ever given a perfect score on – in five rounds of Betas.  One of the things I did notice, that was extremely helpful, was the high availability of Adobe staff in fielding questions during the program.”

Anna E. Kobylinska, Director of McKinley Denali In and an active Acrobat prerelease participant, noted, “Working together with the Adobe Prerelease team and the Acrobat X Prerelease is such a wonderful experience, because they do care and love what they do so much. It’s fun and so efficient to work with them.” 

You can also read about some of the ‘First Impressions’ from prerelease testers in the article here.

The Acrobat prerelease community is truly a thriving group of passionate and diverse Acrobat users. We are forever thankful for their contributions to the development of Acrobat X. Wouldn’t *you* like to be part of it?

 Ashu Mittal, Associate Program Manager, Acrobat Solutions

Hear tips and tricks from Aman on how to automate routine, multi-step tasks with new guided Actions and easily share them with coworkers and collaborators, reducing the burden of training.

Several members of the Acrobat team have already provided a few new Actions that can be downloaded from the Actions Exchange on Acrobatusers.com, and other users can submit and share Actions they create.

Read the full Q&A with Aman here.

And as you put together your gift buying list this year, perhaps she can convince you to give yourself the gift of hassle free sending. Okay, we admit Adobe SendNow may not be the right solution for shipping that dollhouse or action figure gift to your niece and nephew in Ohio, but it may just be the perfect way for you to get that important presentation to your client or a contract over to your loan agent that was supposed to have gone out yesterday.

Check out the post from Amy Wang, product manager for Adobe SendNow,  here.