Almere has tapped Adobe Acrobat Pro to streamline a wide range of essential , intensive document driven activities, ranging from collaborating on city council meeting documents to streamlining completion of service forms to simplifying management of its vast archives. The results include dramatically reduced document storage requirements and productivity boosts across diverse city workers.

“Keeping pace with the city’s rapid growth requires technology that enables us to operate more efficiently and more cost effectively,” says Ludwig van Dijk, ICT manager at the city of Almere. “We rely on Adobe Acrobat Pro to help us streamline our internal and external collaboration, back-end processes, and online services to improve how we operate and enhance the quality of services we deliver.”

For example, Almere’s social workers have doubled their productivity by using PDF forms on tablets to capture evaluation details and obtain client signatures—all while meeting with clients in the comfort and convenience of their homes. Equally impressive, the city has used Adobe Acrobat to improve preparations for weekly council meetings, accelerating the process of assembling and delivering information bundles for council meetings by days.

The inventive city even standardized on PDF/A for document archiving, providing more reliable long-term access to critical city records while reducing storage requirements 20% and saving an estimated €140,000 annually.

“Our challenge is to infuse digital PDF workflows into all our programs, processes, and public services,” explains van Dijk. “Adobe Acrobat Pro delivers superb levels of security, reliability, and speed that help us make this city an even better place.”

To read more about how Almere is using Adobe Acrobat Pro, check out the full story here: http://adobe.ly/NIhy0m

Ali Hanyaloglu, senior marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions

That’s why we’re committed to making Adobe EchoSign the premier eSignature solution for today’s smart businesses. So today, we’re announcing several new features aimed at giving you greater control, greater flexibility and a peace of mind, so to speak.

First, with today’s announcement, all PDF files delivered from Adobe EchoSign will be certified with the Adobe CDS certificate. Adobe Reader and Acrobat will display your document with the Blue Certified Bar. The Adobe stamp certifies that a document delivered via Adobe EchoSign has not been altered or tampered with in any way. It is the genuine article. This is the kind of peace of mind that adds trust and confidence to your deals.

Next, we’ve added the ability to collect supporting documents from signers and attach them to the contract, creating a complete package of the deal. Signers simply upload files during e-signing. The uploaded documents become part of the record for the signed document and they also can be downloaded independently as needed.

In this release, we’ve also added the ability to get documents approved, in addition to the existing functionality of getting documents signed. Approvals can be a very powerful tool for organizational business processes, which require one or more people to approve an agreement before it is sent for signature. Approvers can also be required to fill in data, add initials, or even sign the document.

Finally, Adobe EchoSign is introducing conditional rules that let you define rules in your document for specific form fields to either show or hide based on the data entered during signing. Applying the appropriate conditional rules to form fields within an agreement ensures that the data collected from signers during the signing process matches the organization’s business requirements. Conditions can be defined through the authoring interface or via text-tags. Finally, new radio button fields make it easier for signers and approvers to complete forms.

We want eSignatures to be the standard way people conduct business. And we’ll continue to add features like these to get you there. You can get a more complete description of these new features and how they can enhance your businesses workflow on the Adobe EchoSign website.

Mangesh Bhandarkar, group product manager, Adobe EchoSign

But what if you live in Norway and need to send a form to the denizens of Holland? No problem. Any form you build with your language-specific interface will allow for input in any of the twelve available languages. You can specify the language in which the distributed form will be presented, and you can build the form using your familiar Norwegian interface, but then distribute the form for speakers of Dutch. In this particular case, certain elements of the form (such as the submit button or any error messages that your form respondents might see) will be in Dutch, and not Norwegian—and you don’t need to do any translating (although you’re still on the hook for writing your own questions).

We’re so excited about localizing FormsCentral that we may just go throw ourselves a fiesta. Or maybe a feestje. Maybe we’ll send a form out to the FormsCentral team to see what kind of divertimento everyone wants to have. In the meantime, you can change your language settings by clicking on your account menu in FormsCentral and choosing “My Information”. Or “Dati personali”. Or “Eigene Informationen”. Or…well, you get the idea.

Our iOS application continues to make it easy and legally binding to get documents signed digitally in minutes, rather than the days or weeks it might otherwise take via paper document delivery. Users have reported the value of getting documents signed in person via their iPads and of sending documents from their EchoSign libraries, photo albums, email attachments and other applications. As of today, iOS users will also be able to:

1. Integrate with cloud-based document storage systems such as Box and Dropbox;
2. Save frequently used documents locally to the device and send these saved documents for signature;
3. Integrate with Box OneCloud’s mobile application to allow the Box iOS app to send documents directly to the EchoSign app;
4. Open documents in outside applications;
5. Print documents straight from the mobile device; and
6. Preview documents before sending them out for signature.

Business today is a more mobile pursuit than ever before, and teams are eager to leverage cloud-based, mobile-enabled tools to increase efficiency and close more deals – faster. Adobe EchoSign for iOS devices makes it easier for mobile workforces to incorporate Web contracting into their business activities, increasing productivity.

The latest Adobe EchoSign for iOS is available now. Download the app here.

Mangesh Bhandarkar, group product manager, Adobe EchoSign

Large health services companies like CIGNA constantly add new physicians and small practices to their network, which is a long process. CIGNA expands its network by more than 20,000 customers a year – resulting in more than one million pieces of paper that require signatures. In order to reduce the time needed to complete the paperwork associated with these additions, the company switched to Adobe EchoSign’s eSignature solution. As a result, CIGNA decreased the time it takes to add new physicians and practices into its network by more than half.

After seeing success with Adobe EchoSign, CIGNA adopted the service enterprise-wide. With more than 65 million customers worldwide, it is important that the company has enough physicians and offices to meet its customers’ needs.

With Adobe EchoSign, CIGNA can expand its network faster, giving patients access to more resources and providing faster treatment. Switching to an e-contracting process improved CIGNA’s internal operations and customer relationships. By giving customers faster access to healthcare, CIGNA sees notably greater levels of customer satisfaction. Plus, CIGNA experienced significant savings by eliminating paper and postage, all while expanding its green initiative.

This scenario is not only true for CIGNA, but for many health providers. Paperwork is a necessary part of the healthcare industry; however, it should not prevent patients from receiving the care they need, when they need it.

See how Adobe EchoSign helps other healthcare companies improve the contracting process and provide their patients with more resources in less time here.

Loretta Jones, senior marketing manager, Adobe EchoSign

In this co-presentation session titled “The Benefits of Digital Workflows: ROI and Beyond,” Bombardier manager of Web, social media, and eServices, Ken Knitter, and Adobe solutions consultant, Dave Weinberg, will discuss how Adobe technologies, in particular Adobe Acrobat X Pro, helped Bombardier increase process efficiencies, security and overall ROI.

Ken has been with Bombardier for more than 10 years and is responsible for day-to-day management of Bombardier’s customer portals while leading the creation of a common Web experience for customers. With his help, Bombardier has been able to protect confidential aircraft information, while allowing access to authorized customers and making sure they have updated information instantly when it becomes available.

You can learn more about Ken and Bombardier’s story here.

This is no easy feat for IT. Where to start? I have found that the best organizations do this by first focusing on prioritizing the “pain points” of their end users.

My latest article in Lifehack expands more on the specific challenges I hear on daily basis from customers, like: “Editing PDF documents is a hassle” and “It’s hard to send large files with email and IT restrictions”. In the article, I suggest that IT organizations think beyond just offering tools and begin to leverage best in class practices for their business that address the common issues of the end user. This becomes even important as we move into a new business climate where we are not just trying to be productive on our PC’s, but also on our phones and tablets.

Thanks to feedback from our customers, this is how we think at Adobe when addressing their needs. Now, many companies including McGladrey, Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor, LLP, and Canon are deploying Acrobat for reasons that directly address the pain points of their employees, customers and constituents, and they are all realizing extraordinary benefits.

You can read the full post in Lifehack here for a list of common customer IT “pain points”.

–Mark Grilli, senior director of product marketing, Acrobat Solutions

Based on the interviews, Forrester identified four areas where Acrobat X is helping to save money and improve productivity in IT. These include reimaging systems cost savings, end user productivity gains from more efficient patch deployments, IT cost savings in managing patch rollouts, and cost savings from converting PDF to Microsoft Word or Excel.

Using the data collected from the interviews, Forrester created a financial analysis for a composite organization of 1,000 Adobe Acrobat X users. Over three years, the IT staff time that the composite organization devoted to patch testing and release declined from seven months (pre-Acrobat X) to three weeks (with Acrobat X).  End-users also spent significantly less time rebooting their systems due to reduced patch frequency.  Additionally, IT saved three hours per machine on hardware reimaging by automating the deployment of Acrobat X using Microsoft SCCM.

Bottom line? The three-year, risk-adjusted ROI for Forrester’s composite company is 112 percent, with a breakeven point (payback period) after deployment of 11.8 months.

The Forrester study helps confirm some things we already know about how Acrobat X can benefit an IT organization:

• Enhance existing systems and processes to increase organizational productivity
• Help safeguard systems and data
• Easy deployment and management across the entire enterprise
• Quick data collection using fillable PDF forms
• Streamline PDF tasks
• Expedite document reviews and approvals

You can read the complete Forrester study in the latest edition of the Acrobat IT Newsletter on our IT Resource Center, where you’ll also find technical tips and tricks, whiter papers, expert guidance and more information that will help you deploy and manage Acrobat X efficiently and effectively.

Ali Hanyaloglu, senior marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions

With the help of Adobe FormsCentral, we have simplified many time-consuming, forms-based event management processes.

We can create customized, branded forms using Adobe FormsCentral in five minutes, less time than it takes to create and print out a form using Microsoft Word. The forms are not only branded, but also intuitive. Exhibitors can fill them out on the go with smartphones, which is useful since they are often traveling for other tradeshows. Also, since we can control the layout and required fields in forms, critical information is gathered with ease and accuracy, and this has dramatically accelerated the time it takes to approve and process forms.

A big advantage of FormsCentral is that all of the exhibitors’ responses and requests are readily available online. In the past, we had to organize and carry around reams of paper forms that were submitted, and the spreadsheets we manually created from them. Clunky, manual spreadsheets are a thing of the past, because exhibitors’ responses are safely stored electronically—there’s no more lugging file folders or binders around.

With Adobe FormsCentral, we can log in to any computer and get the information we need. It is all right at our fingertips.

To learn more about the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons and its use of Adobe FormsCentral, read the full story here: http://adobe.ly/KhqEum.

Jason Raymond, exhibits assistant, American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons