With the Adobe EchoSign app, we’re making it that much easier for you to sign documents and send documents for signing right from your iOS device. Here are some of the things you can do with the new Adobe EchoSign application:

• Send a document for legally-binding eSignature and get documents signed in minutes rather than days.
• Get documents signed instantly on your iPad or iPhone when meeting a signer in person.
• Send documents from an EchoSign library, photo album, email attachment or from other applications.
• Track the status of agreements with real-time status updates.
• View signed agreements stored in your EchoSign account.

What’s more, you can do all this securely. The Adobe EchoSign app offers the same protection for both the sender and the signer during the signing process, including key authentication and privacy, fraud protection, and consumer disclosure.

So download the app at the iTunes Stores. After all, it’s free. Happy Holidays!

Here are the highlights:

·         Reflow
As promised, Reflow is back! This is a great feature for reading PDFs on your phone, since it strips the formatting and turns the document into resizable, reflowed text that you can easily scroll through. You can turn this mode on in the View Modes menu, shown here:

·         Remember Last Read Position
One of the frequent comments we’ve seen is that people really want to be able to switch between documents and applications, and be able to return to the exact spot they were reading. Now Adobe Reader remembers your last position in the document for all recently-read documents, so you don’t need to!

·         Opening PDF Portfolio Contents and Attachments
For PDF Portfolios,  Adobe Reader has always allowed opening contents if they were in PDF format. Now it will open any content type that you can view on your phone or tablet.  And since attachments are pretty similar to Portfolios, we’ve also extended this to work for attachments. When you open a document with attachments, Adobe Reader will show a paperclip in the lower right corner of your document, like this:

Just tap the paperclip, and you’ll see a list of the attachments.

·         Bug Fixes
We fixed issues that had been present since the Android Ice Cream Sandwich. 

We’re constantly working to improve Adobe Reader for Phones and Tablets, and we have some great enhancements already underway for 2012 that I’m sure you’ll be excited to see.  We appreciate your ongoing feedback and support!

Dennis Griffin, Principal Product Manager

E-signatures are a huge asset to the education field, especially for a community college system with a limited budget. The California Community Colleges’ Tech Center and California Virtual Campus began using EchoSign’s e-signature solution in February 2010 and saw amazing results. The technology at first was used only internally for invoicing. However, when faced with a project requiring signatures on a memorandum of understanding related to Internet service provision from more than 60 colleges throughout California, the CCC Tech Center turned to e-signatures.

Using the traditional paper method of signing contracts resulted in a turnaround time of about three weeks. “But with EchoSign,” said Bruce Racheter, fiscal and contract manager for the California Virtual Campus, “our average distribute-and-retrieve time was less than a day, with many responses coming in in less than four hours. We even had one document signed, returned and completed in about 45 minutes. That’s a record time for this office.” In the 2010-2011 fiscal year, the CVC and CCC Tech Center processed more than 11,000 documents requiring signatures, so shrinking the turnaround time to just one day saved a great deal of time and money. Employees no longer waste time tracking down missing or late signatures, as they can use EchoSign’s built-in reminder and tracking systems.

Going beyond the cost and time savings, switching to a paperless contracting system also helped the CCC Tech Center achieve their sustainability goals. With a digital system, the use of paper is significantly reduced as contracts don’t need to be printed at each stage, and envelopes and other paper products necessary for mailing aren’t used. Plus, since documents aren’t transported throughout the state, the CCC Tech Center contributes to fuel and vehicle reduction during the mailing process.

The CCC Tech Center experienced the perfect marriage of sustainability and time and cost savings that is possible through e-signature technology. This is just one example of colleges using e-signatures: other universities have seen the results, as well. It won’t be long before schools across the nation get on board and add to the one million contracts that are transacted through EchoSign each month.

Using Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Creative Suite, we’ve developed vast amounts of interactive
content—rich with video, high-definition images, and deep product information—to make our
message clearer and more readily available across a variety of devices. The simple integration
between Adobe products has enabled us to create e-brochures, marketing materials, and other
product content, as well as repurpose other projects.
Using interactive electronic documents, has enabled us to convey more information to medical
professionals and patients in a much more understandable way—making both doctors and
consumers more comfortable with and confident in the therapeutic products offered. For
example, if there is an update to product information, we can quickly change the materials
without generating twice as much printed literature for the product—something our customers
and the environment can appreciate.

We recognize how impactful dynamic PDF documents are when we present a new product to
medical professionals and their clients, helping them understand the true value of the product. By
incorporating video content into a set of product instructions, we can show—beyond just the
written word—the proper ways products should be administered. Additionally, 256-bit
encryption technology helps to ensure that documents are more secure and that the message
being received is as close as what we’re trying to communicate as possible.

—Marty Hardin, SVP, Director of Emerging Media and Technology, Palio

Palio appreciates the intuitive design and functionality of Adobe software, which has enabled print designers at the agency to create interactive materials with minimal support. Using Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium, print designers can add interactive elements and animations to documents that enable sales representatives to deliver dynamic, engaging presentations conveniently on tablets and other devices to quickly gain attention.

Palio is also experimenting with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to further simplify publishing dynamic, engaging content across devices. To learn more about how Palio uses Adobe Acrobat Pro, Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium, and Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to help reach a variety of audiences, click here.

However, you noticed with some dismay that the perfect gift had evaded Aunt Gertrude. On the third night of Hanukkah, she proudly presented you with what you thought was a fuzzy throw pillow. How sweet, you thought naively, a homemade present. Then you noticed it smelled of moth balls and – was that the odor of gasoline? You never got a chance to investigate; when the pillow began to crawl away on what looked like thousands of tiny legs, you chose not to pursue it.

Now, you’re dreading Aunt Gertrude’s return to the family’s annual holiday party; who knows what she might bring along? She’s senile, she can’t help it, your mother says. She means well, your father says. But what does one say to a smelly pillow that walks? What should you tell your Aunt Gertrude?!

Fear not, dear reader. This year, the team at Adobe FormsCentral has put together a fool-proof plan to help you respond to any kind of terrible holiday gift, even the kind that come from Aunt Gertrude. Moldy Christmas fruitcake from the neighbors? “Art” from your sister’s weirdo husband? We’ve got you covered. Take the quiz, and go forth to your holiday gatherings with the confidence that you’ll have the perfect reply for whatever the holiday season has to offer you.

Starting with the File Attachments Field in FormsCentral, users can now collect and store one or more files (including audio and video) from respondents, making things like requests for proposals and resumes, easier to gather and manage. Everything is stored in one central place too, taking the pain out of managing the collection process. Consider this scenario: you’re applying for a grant, which asks you to provide a variety of accompanying files such as images and previous work. Instead of filling out the proposal and then sending the files separately via email, with the new attachment feature in FormsCentral, it’s all done within one form – a one stop shop. This goes for employment applications as well; where the HR department needs to gather resumes, cover letters, references, and more in order to properly consider a candidate. So stop making your life complicated and do yourself a favor by checking out the new attachments feature.

But wait, there’s more.

Nothing is more frustrating than not getting the information you need. This is a huge problem for market researchers – but now, they can stop respondents from entering invalid dates, typing endlessly in a field, or choosing every option when the limit is supposed to be 2. Yes, there is such a thing as too much information. With the new FormsCentral Field Validation features, users can set minimum and maximum values for the number of characters, date or multiple choice fields within their forms – making life simpler for everyone involved.

We’re also introducing some additional functionality to the Submissions Receipt feature we announced in October. Form authors now have the option to protect their anonymity by preventing replies from being sent back to them, as well as exclude or include empty fields in the submission receipt email.

Oh, and you know that convenient little feature called Hyperlinking? We’ve been doing it all through this blog post! Well, we finally support creating hyperlinks in forms (hello 21^st Century) so form authors can make it easier for respondents to go directly to a website for more information or to send a note directly to an email address.

Whether you’re in marketing, sales support, procurement, HR, or IT, we think you’ll find today’s updates will make your jobs of collecting and organizing data in such uses as applications, client intake, and registration forms that much easier. Watch this video for a quick overview, and check out these new features for yourself.  And please continue to send us feedback – the more we know about how you use FormsCentral, the better FormsCentral will become.

–Randy Swineford, FormsCentral Product Manager