The recently released Adobe-commissioned IDC white paper analyzed the current productivity challenges that IT and information workers face in today’s age of digital documents. The study also identifies opportunities for increasing information worker productivity.

With new and improved PDF editing, cloud services integration and enhanced tablet capabilities, Acrobat XI addresses today’s complex document challenges and the problems that compromise the productivity of information workers and IT departments.

]]> http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobat/hanyaloglu-cmswire-tweetjam/feed/ 0 http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobat/part-2-acrobat-xi-tips-and-tricks/ http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobat/part-2-acrobat-xi-tips-and-tricks/#comments Wed, 24 Oct 2012 18:31:09 +0000 Acrobat http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobat/?p=3116 The second video in our series of Acrobat XI tips and tricks is all about eSignatures. With the recent integration of Adobe’s web contracting solution, EchoSign, into Acrobat XI, you can easily sign a PDF yourself electronically or getting a file e-signed by others.

Today’s video is all about converting PDF files. Acrobat XI makes it even easier to convert a PDF file into a Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document that you can quickly edit and reuse. Don’t be scared, check it out!

Adobe Acrobat XI has the capabilities to let you handle the most complex document challenges and help your IT department close the gap on the productivity inefficiencies that result from working with an ever-increasing number of documents. But more than that, Acrobat XI gives you easy access to our powerful cloud services for web contracting and online forms that will make doing business from anywhere a breeze.

Acrobat XI has the features you asked for and then some.  Features like making it easier than ever to edit PDF files and export to Microsoft PowerPoint; touch-friendly capabilities on tablets, and ensuring interoperability with Windows 7 and 8. Acrobat XI also lets you update text directly in PDF, automatically wrap paragraph text, search and replace words in a PDF file, and crop, adjust, or replace images, with the newly designed Edit Text and Images tool.

Customers tell us these features save hours of work.

“Using Acrobat XI, our marketing team can easily edit and fine‐tune text, images, and rich‐media content directly within a PDF presentation whenever and wherever they are, saving valuable time and costs of reworking materials,” said Jim Confalone, founder of ProPoint Graphics.

Better integration with our cloud services, Adobe EchoSign and FormsCentral, has also topped customer request lists, and with Acrobat XI, we made that possible. Using Adobe EchoSign, sales teams can now cut contract cycles and the time to close a deal from weeks to just hours. Think of what that means to your bottom line.  Bill Lunsford, graphics manager, BBDO Atlanta likes how it makes his day easier. “The new EchoSign features within Adobe Acrobat XI will streamline everyday tasks. These days, no one is going to stand at a fax machine to wait for approvals. Being able to electronically sign a PDF on cost estimates for a project will accelerate go‐to‐market schedules,” he said.

With Adobe FormsCentral, you get robust forms creation, data collection, and results analysis that customers are raving about. “The enhancements to FormsCentral within Acrobat XI make creating and distributing well-designed, interactive forms to exchanging information with clients and partners much easier,” said Bart van Wanroij, president of Microsoft software developer, Epona. “We especially love the new graphic representation of the form results summary in Acrobat XI. With FormsCentral capabilities in Acrobat XI, the road to collecting, analyzing, and ultimately reporting on data just became a lot shorter for Epona!”

We also made both Acrobat XI and the new Adobe Reader® XI touch enabled for use on tablet devices.  Now PDF files containing dynamic media content, as well as files in shared review and electronic signature workflows, can be managed from virtually anywhere. With the Reader XI for mobile app, iOS, Android™, and Windows 8 users can collaborate in ways not possible before — adding comments during review cycles, fully interacting with PDF and web forms, and participating in electronic signature workflows. Additionally, IT can now deliver Reader XI or Acrobat XI as a centrally-managed, touch-friendly, virtual application with improved support for Citrix.

Mike Mann, release and deployment analyst, at McGladrey, thinks the new touch-enabled Reader makes McGladrey staff more efficient. “Our employees use tablets to get work done on the go. With the new editing features supported in Adobe Reader for mobile devices, our employees will be able to review PDF files and make notes at any time, increasing productivity and encouraging adoption of mobile technology,” he said.

IT professionals are praising Acrobat XI for its tighter SharePoint and Office integration. “The integration of Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft SharePoint is greatly improving how the Juvenile Justice Partners manage, share, and publish juvenile case information,” said Susan Green, assistant CIO, at the San Diego County District Attorney’s office.

Acrobat XI also streamlines deployment and maintenance, which Rob Brawn, director for the Center of Project Excellence, CH2M Hill, thinks is a huge time saver. “It is a full time job to manage software updates and keep users current on software versions. Acrobat XI security enhancements minimize out‐of‐cycle patches, saving time for IT and the users,” he said. Acrobat XI also provides industry-leading security features and supports application virtualization via Citrix XenApp software to provide a low cost of ownership and sound return on investment.

If greater productivity, efficiency and better ROI top your list of goals for your organization, give Acrobat XI a look with a free 30-day trial for Windows or Mac. If you already know the benefits Acrobat brings to a business, and you’re ready “to go to 11,” upgrading is easy and starts at just $199 for Acrobat XI Pro. So what are you waiting for?

Mark Grilli, senior director of product marketing, Acrobat Solutions

Important P.S. for LiveCycle Designer Users!

You’ve probably already heard that LiveCycle Designer will no longer be shipping with Acrobat XI. But don’t panic. For those of you who have been using LiveCycle Designer with Acrobat 8*, Acrobat 9 or Acrobat X and want to upgrade to the latest and greatest, we’re offering a free version of LiveCycle once you upgrade to Acrobat XI, just so you can keep on using the programs you’re used to working with. Just get in touch with us and let us know that you’ve upgraded to Acrobat XI. Our customer service representatives will be happy to provide you with the latest version of LiveCycle Designer so you can continue to get your work done as usual with Acrobat XI.

Finally, you started using Adobe FormsCentral to create and share your online and PDF forms – and before you knew it, so was everyone else.

We’ve been hearing lots of stories just like this one, and so we’ve decided that we should make it easier and more affordable for you and your whole team to use FormsCentral.

Starting now, you can purchase FormsCentral subscriptions at a discounted rate if you purchase subscriptions for the whole team. Go ahead and set the trend!

For more on available bundles, pricing and info, check out the FormsCentral Team Subscription at https://www.acrobat.com/formscentral/en/pricing/team-pricing.html

- Rebecca Staley, Marketing Specialist, Acrobat Solutions

This is a huge cost, but it’s also a tremendous opportunity. As our research shows, time wasted on unproductive tasks adds up to a 21.3% hit on the organization’s overall productivity. Addressing the time wasters would be equivalent to adding 213 employees in a 1,000 person organization – employees who could be out selling and supporting customers, designing and building new products, innovating and driving the business forward.

We’ve seen plenty of investment in business process improvement over the past few years, but most of these efforts are aimed at re-engineering or automating business processes that are system-to-system, or system-to-human. Our research findings on information worker productivity suggest that organizations need to place similar emphasis on improving individual productivity and human-to-human business processes.

There’s some evidence that executives in many organizations are recognizing the importance of information worker productivity. IDC’s CIO survey research shows productivity is a top priority this year. But where to start?

A surprising finding in our survey is that information workers spend a very large percentage of their time working with documents in one way or another – researching and gathering information for documents, creating, merging edits and comments from multiple reviewers into a single revision, managing the document approval process and obtaining approvals and signatures, and dealing with forms and forms data. As it turns out, quite a bit of this time is spent dealing with a variety of frustrations and challenges. It’s no one single thing – it’s a whole slew of time wasters that fall broadly under personal productivity and collaboration.

We think the challenges working with documents are only increasing as employees increasingly work on the go using smartphones and tablets in addition to their PCs, and collaborate with people outside the organization. And not just for information workers: the growing needs around mobility and external collaboration are also creating new challenges for IT around security and risk management, so we believe the time is now to address document-based productivity issues.

Does your organization have a program underway to improve information worker productivity? If so, what steps are you taking? If not, what’s holding you back?

Read more in the full IDC white paper, here.

Melissa Webster, program vice president, IDC

Follow Melissa Webster on Twitter: mwebster_idc

Acrobat addresses the problems that compromise the productivity of information workers and IT departments.  As CMSWire’s David Roe wrote this week, “The features have been built around actual enterprise needs.” Reporters from InformationWeek, eWeek, TechCrunch and PC World and more also reported on the white paper this week.

You can read the report in full here.