Universally-accepted file types – including PDF, unfortunately – are one of many ways these hackers gain entry to systems by embedding malicious code into the files. So choosing a PDF software application that fully uses modern mitigation techniques to reduce risk is obviously important. To help you understand the risks and evaluate a vendor’s approach to security, we have recently updated and published the white paper PDF Application Security – How to minimize your risk. It’s available for free from Adobe’s web site.

The white paper contains results of independent third-­party testing on the entire Acrobat family of products, specifically related to security. Adobe Reader X and Adobe Acrobat X produced excellent results in security testing by implementing what security experts call a “defense-in-depth” approach within the software and as offered by the operating system. Adobe Reader XI and Adobe Acrobat XI have improved security and sandboxing even further, and Adobe continues to invest in security. This investment has helped reduce the need for out-­of-­cycle security updates. Note in the diagram below, Adobe Acrobat X only had two out-­of-­cycle security updates, while Adobe Acrobat 9 had seven. Deploying a software patch is a timely and expensive process, so we want to help IT professionals minimize those costs by reducing the number of out-of-cycle patches for the Adobe Acrobat family of products.

If you are considering PDF software based on the licensing cost, please be careful. The days of making software choices based on the quoted price alone – without thorough consideration of security – are long gone. You should be asking vendors about operating system mitigations built into their PDF software, processes in place for addressing security threats, and even how involved the vendor is with the broader security community. To get more details about all the ways the Adobe Acrobat family helps organizations do more with PDF, while also providing advanced security, lower costs, and easier software management, download and read the free white paper, PDF Application Security – How to minimize your risk.

Adobe IT began testing of Acrobat XI during the pre-release phase with approximately 1,000 employees worldwide and some pre-release volunteers. The test plan was focused on making sure that the previous version uninstalled properly, and that Acrobat could be used successfully for day-to-day tasks, such as accessing documents stored in enterprise systems, completing and submitting forms, and participating in shared reviews.

A big part of preparing to deploy any software application is the customization of the installer, and Acrobat XI is no different. Adobe IT had requirements around customizing the installation that included applications and document security settings, such as rights management and Protected View, and a desire to make the install smoother and faster for all users. The deployment of Acrobat XI at Adobe translated to approximately 9,500 systems, with almost half of them on Mac. Adobe IT made the decision to use SCCM for Windows deployments and Casper from JAMF software for Mac deployments.

How was the customization done? With the Adobe Customization Wizard. Most customization decisions were made based on previous installations. This included using the company wide serial number, setting Acrobat as the default PDF viewer, disabling registration, and customizing the User Name and Organization. Another important customization was to include the Adobe Addressbook and Directory Acrodata files. Adobe IT teams from across the world worked together to create and test the installation packages. In addition to deploying straight to desktops, an installation needed to be created for Adobe’s Citrix XenApp environment for those users who prefer or need to run internal applications virtually via Citrix Receiver.

Within six weeks of deployment, Acrobat XI was installed to over 85% of machines within Adobe. Adobe IT is very pleased with the deployment and directly attributes this to the installation speed. Migrating from Acrobat 8 to 9 took about 45 minutes to install, while the Acrobat XI migration took only 4-5 minutes. Another positive is that they have had no significant support issues with Acrobat XI.

When asked what they would do differently, Adobe IT states that getting familiar with the customization settings during the testing prior to release would have made things even easier. Doing so would have also given them a greater appreciation for installation dependencies of other applications. Did anything impact the deployment schedules? Only a small number of stubborn users who declined to upgrade right away or refused to restart their Windows machine so SCCM could do its work.

The deployment of Acrobat XI within Adobe was a big success due to the hard work of Adobe IT. Their focus on testing the prerelease and customizing the installation led to a quick deployment with minimal issues. If you need help with deployment of Acrobat XI, everything you need to know is located right here: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/it-resources.html. It’s like having the Acrobat team right by your side!

Lisa Croft, product  marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions

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.

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.

We’ve added several much-asked-for features that are aimed at making life easier for information workers like you. Acrobat XI features complete PDF editing and export to PowerPoint; touch-friendly capabilities on tablets; sophisticated web contracting with Adobe EchoSign; and forms creation, data collection and analysis with Adobe FormsCentral.

We’ve added features IT people have asked for, too:  seamless Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration, easy deployment, applications virtualization and robust application security to provide a low cost of ownership and sound return on investment.

The new Acrobat XI family includes Acrobat XI, Adobe Reader XI and newly integrated document services, Adobe FormsCentral and Adobe EchoSign.

It’s About Productivity

The explosion of digital documents in the workplace has created new challenges for productivity.  With Acrobat XI we’re taking on the issues that are dragging down individual and organizational productivity.

Each week, individual information workers spend half their time searching, filing, organizing, merging and editing comments, obtaining signatures, reviewing feedback and consolidating data, or collaborating with people outside their organizations. IT departments struggle with integrating and managing a diversity of platforms, devices and services, while trying to protect sensitive corporate IP and personal information.

Information workers are asking:  “How do I do what I was doing before, but work in this new environment?”

And organizations of all types are faced with adapting to this complexity, while driving their businesses forward, wondering: “How do I accelerate revenue, secure my IP and continue to evolve my workers capabilities to meet these new challenges?”

These productivity, collaboration, device and security issues have a significant impact on organizations. We’re calling this the Document Productivity Gap. The key to closing the gap is to recognize  that it is a set of compounding issues, multiple, little things that add up to have a big impact.

We asked IDC to take a closer look at these inefficiencies and the impact document-based challenges have on information workers and IT professionals.  One finding startled me. According to a recent global IDC white paper, sponsored by Adobe, the addressable impact of these inefficiencies on an organization of 1,000 employees is almost $16 million annually.  And those are the addressable gaps – not theoretical nirvana that is impossible to reach, but very realistic, tangible gaps that can be closed today. For example, if we could bridge the gap we could add 21.3 percent to an organization’s resources – or the equivalent of 213 employees for every 1,000 people at an organization.  Even if we recover just half of this productivity loss, it could equal hiring close to 100 new employees for a 1,000 person organization.  Imagine the impact of 100 new engineers, salespeople, marketers or IT professionals?

What “11” Means: Customers Weigh In

With the new release, we have made significant innovations across the desktop and the cloud to address the gap.  We wanted to:

• Enable information workers to unlock PDF content with comprehensive tools for both editing and content reuse.
• Accelerate document exchange using PDF and the web, forms data collection, review, approvals and eSignatures.
• Empower employees to be productive on the go with PDF on tablets and smartphones.
• Mitigate risk and lower IT costs with the most advanced document and application security.

It looks like we’ve succeeded. Acrobat XI has gotten high marks from customers that were in our beta program. These customers are typical of those dealing with the gap.

Security is high on the list for many. Mike Mann, release and deployment analyst at tax and finance consultancy, McGladrey, said, “Our client information is sensitive, so document security is critical. Acrobat XI offers advance document protection capabilities that are easier than ever for our staff to uniformly secure documents.”

Bill Lunsford of BBDO Atlanta likes the speed and efficiency he gets with the integrated services, especially EchoSign. “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.”

Yvonne Willis, enterprise applications and project manager at Pillsbury Law, echoed that: “Security is the talk of the town. All of our clients expect the highest level of security, from our documents through our applications and IT environment. Acrobat XI provides key security enhancements that support both users and IT professionals.”

Regarding accelerating document exchange, Saul Morse, vice president of multichannel integration, Palio, said, “Acrobat XI now makes it even easier and faster to create PDF forms and to automatically distribute and collect information with new online forms services available within Acrobat XI.”

But BBDO Atlanta’s Lunsford summed up Acrobat XI best: “I leverage the heck out of Adobe Acrobat because I can cut down on the resources and my IT department loves me.”

Today is October 1. Mark it down as the day we close the gap.

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

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @LynchKevinM