During the week of April 30 – May 6, we’ll give you 25 points for each thumbs up or down vote you give to any answer on Acrobat Answers. At that rate, it won’t take you long to get to the Contributor level of 500 points.

This is a great way to move up through the ranks from Participant to Expert. As you attain the level of Contributor and beyond, you gain recognition in the community….plus some really cool rewards.

If you haven’t signed up yet with Acrobat Answers, you get 100 points just for joining. How cool is that?

So go to Acrobat Answers on April 30 and start voting. Just click the ‘find answers’ button in the middle of the page. Happy voting!

Lori DeFurio, group product marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions

Adobe EchoSign for Salesforce version 12 features an improved administration page, with easy-to-follow setup steps and direct links to customization guidelines and documentation. Users can also now easily merge data from Salesforce into their EchoSign agreements before sending them out for signatures. Merged data can come from accounts, opportunities and other objects within Salesforce.

For a full overview of the improved features and capabilities in today’s release of Adobe EchoSign for Salesforce version 12, check out today’s EchoSign post from Mangesh Bhandarkar, group product manager at Adobe.

CreatePDF Team edition is perfect for business and creative professionals. Now everyone on the team can convert an unlimited number of files to PDF and get special pricing with one single annual subscription. Bottom line: No one has to rely on one person to create PDF files.

What’s more, with Adobe CreatePDF you’re certain that your important documents look and stay the way you want them to because PDF files are accessible on hundreds of millions of desktops worldwide with Adobe Reader.

Annual subscriptions to CreatePDF are available in packages of five, 10, 25, 50 and 100. Prices are as low as $5.49 per user per month. You get a bonus seat at no charge when you buy a subscription. So that five-pack becomes a six-pack and so on.

With CreatePDF Team edition:

• The more you buy, the more you save. Get a higher discount with more seats.
• Easily add, delete or view members of your team with the Team Administrative Page.

Check out CreatePDF and give everyone the freedom to create, and edit PDF files while saving on business costs.

William Lau, senior product marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions.

Today, we are pleased to announce that creating forms and surveys as fillable PDF documents is just as easy with FormsCentral.

More Ways to Reach Your Audience

One of the most important things to consider when creating a form is your target audience. For example, reaching the maximum number of people and getting them to successfully complete the form can help you plan an event with greater precision—from getting a big enough venue down to the right number of meal preferences for the attendees. FormsCentral now gives form authors a choice to pick from a web form or fillable PDF document. If your prospective audience is more document focused, the PDF form is a great option. It can be emailed, shared through managed file transfer services or printed out and filled in with a pen.

And true to form, it’s incredibly easy to toggle between web and PDF forms. With a few clicks you can set page breaks and choose between an array of document sizes (8×11, A4, Legal, etc.) for your PDF. Or, if you change your mind, it is just as easy to take the PDF layout and reformat the flow to suit a web form to take advantage of PayPal integration, attachments, and skip logic.

Collect Information Online or Offline

Form authors now have more ways to collect information. One way is to distribute a fillable PDF form to respondents and have the data returned via a basic PDF, where the responses are embedded in the actual form. This method is particularly useful for situations when your audience may want to save the file locally to complete it at a later time.

The other method, which I am particularly fond of, is to post the results directly to the FormsCentral service. Just like with web forms, once a respondent hits the submit button on a PDF form, the data automatically goes to the Response table, where you can see the results in real time and invite others to collaborate and analyze the input.

With the expansion to PDF forms, we can help rapidly expand your ability to create and distribute forms and surveys for virtually any scenario—be it online or offline. Likewise, we’ve also added more web form templates to help you get started—from registration to hospitality to procurement and much more.

FormsCentral Basic and Plus users can begin using the new PDF form feature right away. You can find more details about these enhancements here. Try them out and tell us how they’re helping your business, school, or organization! Also, check out this video of Rebecca Staley, marketing specialist for Acrobat Solutions, who shows off the new PDF forms feature in FormsCentral.

Randy Swineford, FormsCentral Product Manager

The Adobe Acrobat team has used FormsCentral to create an Earth Day quiz – and every question tests your ability to survive in a bio-dome!  Don’t panic – if your eco-habits lead to harmony instead of mutiny, you’re heading in the right direction.

Did you know April 22 was declared ‘International Mother Earth Day’ by the United Nations in 2009? However, the day has been recognized long before the UN’s declaration. In fact, more than 175 countries celebrate Earth Day with festivities that bring awareness and appreciation to our natural environment.  Now you can join in, and it’s all in good fun. Challenge yourself with this quiz and let us know how it goes. Take the quiz now.  Good luck!

From the human resources department to business development, paperwork is constantly being filed and tracked. However, it is often difficult to manage so many documents, hindering productivity and causing confusion when the necessary document cannot be found.

Since time is money, companies in the telecom industry cannot afford to spend extra time looking for lost paperwork. An eSignature solution enables departments to complete contracts faster and allows for automatic filing, eliminating the need to track lost documents.

Advantix Solutions – an organization that specializes in optimizing, negotiating and managing complex telecom programs for companies in multiple industries, which results in stacks of paperwork – is a great example. Before Advantix Solutions adopted an eSignature solution, various departments struggled with storing, tracking and securing sensitive documents. After experiencing the drawbacks associated with paper agreements, the team decided to switch to an eSignature solution and determined that Adobe EchoSign was the best fit.

The solution was easily integrated with other Advantix platforms, making it span effortlessly across all departments. The business development team uses Adobe EchoSign during contracting with clients and partners, as it provides verifiable time stamps on non-disclosure agreements. The human resources department uses the eSignature solution slightly differently, relying on Adobe EchoSign to file and store job offer letters and documents involved in the employee review process.

Simple to use, Adobe EchoSign didn’t require advanced training for employees.  Departments were quickly able to use the eSignature solution to its fullest extent. After the switch, Advantix Solutions noticed a significantly shorter contracting process and documents no longer went missing.  It was much easier to provide analysis and management services to customers once all of the necessary documents were stored in one place. Implementing an eSignature solution saves time and helps more companies in the telecom industry provide the best possible service.

How has adopting eSignatures helped your business? We’d love to hear from you.

Loretta Jones, senior marketing manager, Adobe

“Adobe FormsCentral is an intuitive solution that enables anyone in our office, including part‐time student employees, to rapidly create important forms and distribute them to students and campus organizations easily.” As a result, DOSO and more than 300 student organizations can efficiently promote involvement in social, spiritual/religious, service, university pride, leadership events, and other activities—using Adobe FormsCentral to help collect information for retreats, orders, applications, and registrations, as well as assessment. The university student government even uses Adobe FormsCentral in its election process every spring.

Before moving to the Adobe solution, staff members created online forms manually. With Adobe FormsCentral staff and authorized students can now quickly create a variety of easily accessible, interactive forms that dramatically reduce the time it takes to collect student surveys, event registrations, and other information. Adds Dejonghe, “Using Adobe FormsCentral we embedded approximately 25 standardized digital form templates directly into our website, enabling students and organization leaders to access and distribute them any time or day of the week.”

Forms completed with the Adobe solution are easily tracked and analyzed, and DOSO can use the Adobe FormsCentral results table to instantly sort and filter responses, track trends, and analyze and share information with colleagues and student leaders. To learn more about Wayne State and its use of Adobe FormsCentral, click here.

With today’s release, the days of printing, signing and faxing back documents are truly numbered. We’ve tightened the integration between Adobe Reader and Adobe EchoSign eSignature service, so you and your customers can gain real-time visibility into the signature process and status of contracts – giving you greater assurance and control over the management of all signed documents. We’ve also streamlined the desktop experience and added features that give you more choice and greater functionality.

Thanks to Adobe Reader for mobile, you can electronically sign a document by simply drawing your signature with your finger on a touchscreen, making it easy to conduct business while on the go.  Additionally, you can connect to Adobe EchoSign to get others to sign documents electronically, letting you track and manage the status of documents online. And, because the signed contracts are archived in the cloud, you can easily retrieve documents from anywhere, at any time, via a web browser.

We didn’t stop there, though. Adobe Reader for mobile also adds new capabilities that let you interact with PDF documents directly from your iOS or Android devices, including annotation, comment and forms fill. And, of course, the highly intuitive user interface provides an efficient PDF viewing experience regardless of the device.

With Adobe Reader and EchoSign, we’re making it easy for anyone to send important contracts to customers so that they can quickly and easily sign and send them electronically – and get the deal done faster. Give Adobe Reader with EchoSign a test drive on your next deal.

Kevin M. Lynch, SVP and GM, Acrobat and Document Services, Adobe

Users can choose the Highlight, Strikethrough, or Underline annotation tools, and drag over any text to easily markup text

Users can electronically sign a document by hand-drawing their signature with their finger on a touchscreen

Users can connect to Adobe EchoSign to get others to sign documents electronically, enabling senders to track and manage the status of documents online and users to retrieve documents from anywhere, at any time, via a web browser • Rebecca Staley, Marketing Specialist for Adobe Acrobat Solutions, discusses the new eSignature enhancements to Adobe Reader for the desktop and mobile devices.