Acrobat Blog

Insights, trends, news and highlights on all things Acrobat

The Adobe FormsCentral team was thrilled with the birthday love it received last week, but that wasn’t the only reason we had to cheer. In a week where FormsCentral celebrated its one-year anniversary and saw many users participate in its Valentine’s Day survey, FormsCentral received the Editor’s Choice designation from PC Magazine with a four star rating for its “simple form design capabilities and especially for the data analysis it could enable for small businesses.”

As much as you can have fun building customized surveys – as we demonstrated with our Valentine’s Day and Holiday surveys – using FormsCentral also makes a lot of business sense. But don’t take our word for it. Take a look at what PC Mag had to say: “For businesses that rely on analysis of their current and potential client base, Adobe FormsCentral could prove to have real ROI.”

More important to making business sense, Adobe FormsCentral is so easy to use, even a caveman…ok we won’t go there, but you get the idea. Need proof? PC Mag said, “FormsCentral is a good way to create some neat forms for interacting with visitors and customers to your site—without having to beg your developer buddies for help (or hire one!).”

As great as last week was for the Adobe FormsCentral team, it’s just the beginning. We have a lot more exciting features in store for the coming year, so stay tuned!

A stock broker meets the World’s Smartest Project Manager — and takes away the completely wrong message. Check this guy out.

Inaugural Event Provides Best Practices from Leading Companies and Insight into Industry Trends 

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Feb. 16, 2012 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced event information for its Adobe® EchoSign® Web Contracts 2012 user conference to be held on Thursday, February 23, 2012 at the Marriott Hotel in San Jose, Calif. Attendees will hear from some of today’s leading business executives and industry analysts, and learn how Adobe EchoSign customers have reduced their entire time-to-signature on contracts from days to 42 minutes on average.

“Adobe EchoSign’s online, paperless contracting solution helps reduce paperwork, streamline administrative processes and enables us to make contracting with care providers easier and faster,” said Tim Kaja, senior vice president of network and provider services for UnitedHealth Group. “Adobe EchoSign is one of many solutions UnitedHealth Group uses to make the health care system more efficient and cost-effective for everyone.”

“E-signature market momentum is steadily growing due to rapidly evolving business process and workflow automation,” wrote Craig Le Clair, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. “The extra focus on the customer experience gives companies an added impetus to use e-signatures to improve business processes and meet anticipated regulations.”¹

Web Contracts 2012 attendees will be able to attend insightful sessions and learn from EchoSign customers who have leveraged Web contracting to improve their processes and revenue, hear about best practices, and network with key industry analysts and business executives. Speakers from companies such as Meltwater, UnitedHealthcare, and Cigna will highlight their use of e-signatures and offer advice on how to achieve tangible benefits through Web contracting. Session topics will include global Web contracting, compliance issues, EchoSign partner applications, the future of Web contracting and more.

“The majority of contracts are now signed on the Web because of the speed, ease-of-use and cost savings that Web contracts offer,” said Jason Lemkin, vice president of Web business services at Adobe. “This user conference offers attendees the opportunity to delve into the specific uses of Web contracting in a variety of industries and hear real-world examples of increased efficiency and improved processes from customer case studies.”

Acquired by Adobe in July 2011, Adobe EchoSign is the leading electronic signatures and signature automation service with more than 4 million users and 50,000 customers worldwide. Adobe EchoSign is a key component of Adobe’s document exchange services platform for reliably exchanging documents for universal access, review and approval.

For more information and to register for the conference, please visit www.echosign.com.

Valentine schmalentine, as I say each year on February 14th. Well, this year I’m singing a new tune – to the tune of Happy Birthday, as it happens. Today is the anniversary of our darling FormsCentral, and oh, my! Has this baby grown up in the past year! To reminisce, we asked Todd and Randy from the FormsCentral team to wax poetic on their favorite moments of the service’s first full year. Here’s looking at you, FormsCentral!

Update: Thanks to all those who tuned in for our Twitterview on 2/10.  Please find below a full transcript of our great Q&A with Online/Social Customer Success Engineer David Kastendick!

We’re excited to announce that David Kastendick, our Online/Social Customer Success Engineer, will be participating in our next Twitterview this Friday, February 10^th at 10AM PST. As an IT and customer service professional, David is fully qualified to dig into your toughest Acrobat related questions.

So break out your Acrobat knowledge! From shortcuts, tips & tricks, technical issues and more, we are happy to address each your comments live via Twitter.  If you don’t have a Twitter account, don’t worry, you can still participate! Please leave your questions in the comments section of this blog post.

If there are any Acrobat related questions or comments you might have, this Twitterview is a great opportunity to get them out in the open in a fun and social manner.  Plus you can meet another member of our fantastic team!  So please join us, this Friday 2/10 at 10AM PST, for an informative and engaging session.

If you can’t make it live, check back in on this blog for a full recap afterwards.  You can also find more information on David below.

David Kastendick is an Online/Social Customer Success Engineer for both Acrobat and Adobe’s Document Cloud services. Since 2010 he has assisted desktop and enterprise users through a variety of channels with the goal of complete customer satisfaction at the forefront. Prior to joining Adobe, David worked with an Adobe partner in training, management, and support roles. When he isn’t working to resolve customer issues, he enjoys exploring the Pacific Northwest where he resides.

Do you remember the game “Would You Rather” from our middle school days? If you’ve never played, here’s the premise: friends give each other two horrifying scenarios to choose from. You must choose one scenario. And that’s the whole game. In middle school, these choices were usually something like “Would you rather eat bugs or drink a glass of mud?” or “Would you rather wear your mom’s clothes to a party or get on the school PA system and sing a Tony Bennett song dedicated to your crush?”

As you’ve probable surmised, it’s impossible to win this game. No matter which choice you pick, you always wind up with something less than palatable. Winning is hardly the point, though; the point is to wait your turn to watch your friends squirm with discomfort or howl with dismay, depending on their outcome. Endless fun for everyone, right? Of course.

Fast forward to right now. We’re way beyond middle school, and most of us have a far more sophisticated sense of fun.

…And when we say our humor is “more sophisticated”, what we mean is that our humor is the same, just older. That’s why the FormsCentral team has recreated “Would You Rather” for grown-ups, all in honor of Valentine’s Day. We’ve put together a very unsentimental, unromantic, choose-your-own-adventure quiz for all of us who’d rather gloat over the gruesome fictional fate of our friends than sit through a sappy romantic comedy replete with terrible banter and predictable storyline. If we can promise you anything about the Valentine’s Day quiz on FormsCentral, we promise that the storylines you’ll read there are anything but predictable. Remember what we said? ENDLESS FUN. Knock yourselves out (and gross out your friends) with these gruesome choices here.