At Adobe, we value our user’s opinions and take into account your suggestions for upcoming product and services updates. In fact, the brand new FormsCentral features (Page skip logic, Summary reports and Form templates) came directly from our user community!

2011 has been an exciting year for us. We kicked off our year with our first Twitteview (#Acroview) with senior product managers Chris French and Dave Stromfeld. Then in March we launched our Facebook page and shortly after the Acrobat Solutions Group on LinkedIn.  Most recently we’ve introduced the Acrobat YouTube channel to share the latest cool tricks, tutorials and insider perspectives from our developers and managers.

We’ve certainly grown our social reach in the past couple months and want to hear from you, our customers, to find out how we are doing. Similar to our products and services, we welcome your feedback and invite you to participate in the following FormsCentral survey below. We are looking forward to hearing what you think and thank you for your time in taking this quick survey.

“What exactly are the OCR improvements in Acrobat X?”

Our Joel Geraci offers his insight into these Acrobat X additions.  See below for a preview, and click here for the extended blog post!

That question came in recently from one of our field people. As a marketing guy, I just take engineering’s word for everything [not really]. If they tell me that the OCR is improved, I say “ok” and move on [again, not really - this is just a rhetorical conceit]. So I asked, they told.

To begin with, there’s a new OCR engine in there and it’s operating at about 1% more accurate than the previous one. Now, I know that one percent doesn’t sound like much but when your already close to 100%, that extra one percent is a big deal. But there are also some process and usability improvements as well.

Check out this link for more content and analysis from Joel!

Have you been using Adobe SendNow for sending your biggest files?  Our updated cloud file transfer service was created to help you avoid the hassle of FTP servers, bounced emails, or any of the other obstacles that come with transferring large amounts of data.  And now, you have an opportunity to win a year-long subscription to Adobe SendNow just by hopping on your Twitter account and helping us spread the word!

Beginning today (Wednesday, August 17^th ) and running until August 24^th, please join our Adobe SendNow Tweetaway! We’ll be publishing tweets accompanied by the #TrySendNow hashtag.  Just follow us and ReTweet any of them to become eligible for our random drawing.  A year’s worth of hassle free, zero cost file transfers can be yours just for the price of a ReTweet!  Stay tuned to our Twitter account, keep an eye out for the #TrySendNow hashtag, and thanks!

The contest opens at 10 a.m., Wednesday, August 17, 2011, and closes 2 p.m., Wednesday August 24, 2011. The prize drawing for SendNow (no product prize exchanges available) will occur on or before 5 p.m., August 24th, 2011 with the winner announcement occurring that day well. The drawings are open to residents in North America only.

Christopher Atwood, Director of Academic Technology at Pomfret School, recently talked to us about how the school uses Adobe FormsCentral as a rich, collaborative, and environmentally responsible course registration and assessment tool. Pomfret administrators looked at how they could automate many document processes that traditionally relied on paper. With a history of success using Adobe software in classrooms, school administrators turned to Adobe to help automate several routing processes. Atwood says, “With Adobe FormsCentral we’ve expanded our relationship with Adobe and now have exactly the right solution to tackle a variety of administrative challenges.”

For example, Adobe FormsCentral provides Pomfret School a flexible platform to create and deliver registration and testing forms to students at the beginning of each school year. At the same time, skills-assessment forms for math and other subjects are made available online to incoming students, enabling Pomfret to place students in classes best-suited to their skill levels. The Adobe solution also streamlines sharing student assessments with teachers, who no longer have to wait for paper-based tests to arrive by mail or come back to campus to pick up assessments. To learn more about how Pomfret School is using Adobe FormsCentral, click here.

Todd Gerber, group product marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions

The winner of our recently concluded FormsCentral Tweetaway is @JuliaFoster! Congratulations again and thanks for helping us spread the word.  Julia will be receiving a one year FormsCentral subscription!

In case you missed our tweets, FormsCentral is one of the easiest ways to collect, analyze, and report on your data.

• Check out FormsCentral, powerful online form builder, for real time results and analysis
• With FormsCentral, you can easily create, distribute and analyze online forms
• FormsCentral makes the task of creating surveys and collecting and analyzing data simpler than ever!

Learn more about the latest new features such as Summary Reports, Rating Scales, Apply Skip Logic, Twitter integration by checking out the FormsCentral site!

If you didn’t get a chance to participate in our contest, don’t worry the next one is right around the corner!  Please stay tuned to Acrobat on Twitter for the latest news and updates!

We feel very lucky to be hearing from all of you about what you need in a good cloud-based forms authoring and distribution service. As you may have read, we’ve recently been able to implement several brand new features that you have been asking about for some time. In several installments over the next week or two, we’ll take a closer look at these features and what you can now newly do with Adobe FormsCentral!

New feature #1: Page Skip Logic

This addition was one of the features most often requested on the forum and through e-mail feedback to the team. Until now, respondents have had to go through all questions on a form, and in some cases, only a subset of respondents would need to respond to all of those. Thus, you may have been required to include apologies like “If you answered yes to the last question, go to question 3. If you answered no, go to question 4.”

No longer! Now, with either the Basic or the Plus plan, you can add rules to your page breaks that allow questions to be skipped altogether.

For the full post, click here.

New feature #2: Summary Reports

Summary reports. These beauties are now built into your forms once data starts flowing in; without exporting any data or fussing around with other spreadsheet programs, you can view your form’s responses graphically. Today, we’ll go through the details of what these summaries can do for you in FormsCentral.

For the full post, click here.

New feature #3: Form Templates

Now, born of your innovation (and your many requests for new ways to kick-start certain form types), we present 7 new form templates to support the various ways in which you’ve been using FormsCentral. We like to keep them organized by category, so here they are, according to the type of form they represent.

For the full post, click here.

Rebecca Staley, Acrobat.com marketing specialist, Acrobat Solutions