At BBDO Atlanta, the volumes of documents and assets we manage are pretty staggering. We house one of the largest print production centers in Omnicom’s global network of advertising agencies, so we are responsible for some very visible advertising for big-name clients. Every year, we produce between 18,000 and 20,000 highly refined ad mechanicals — creating and managing over 5,000 assets monthly.

Each ad mechanical we produce is a PDF document that moves through our workflow from start to finish. The entire production cycle is documented using Adobe Acrobat.  We time-stamp, log, and track production responsibilities and review cycles. Review cycles go faster as team members no longer have to decipher handwriting and can layer comments together within the file.

All of our print coordinators then run the files associated with an ad through a customized Acrobat preflight process that vets the mechanical for the requirements of hundreds of different publications. Everything is checked in great detail—ink density, dots per inch, missing fonts—you name it.

Our customized workflow is great because it allows us to take advantage of the out-of-the-box functionality of Acrobat   yet combine it with our own in-house production system. It gives us an enterprise-scale solution at low cost of ownership. Our users have more control and our IT professionals worry less about inadvertent errors.

Now, four print coordinators handle the workflow that previously required dozens of people working multiple shifts. We’ve eliminated the use of third-party software for checking final specifications, boosted the degree of quality assurance and predictability, and we’re getting closer to a paperless environment.

The main competitive differentiator for us is this turnkey automated workflow. It delivers highly repeatable, flexible, trusted outcomes that keep our clients happy. It also provides us with a strong sense of confidence and pride about our production services.

Adobe Acrobat brings a Zen approach to our project workflow; managing the job is easier and our employees are more productive.

Bill Lunsford, DBA, Graphics Manager, BBDO

Read the full story here: http://adobe.ly/O8XiSH

Do you create forms in Adobe FormsCentral that make you proud? Forms that look good, that ask exactly the right questions, that just seem like the perfect forms? Do you ever wish you could share these awesomely awesome forms with the rest of the world?

Well, wish no more: AcrobatUsers.com now has a FormsCentral template exchange, which allows you to upload your designs and share them with other users at the Acrobat User Community. If you don’t make forms of your own, but want to use someone else’s awesomely awesome forms, you can browse through, download and use FormsCentral templates that others have uploaded, and rate or comment on these templates.

The template exchange is a great way to see what others are doing with FormsCentral and to share your work with the FormsCentral community. Go check it out today to start uploading your templates and browsing those that have been shared by others. If you’re interested in learning how to save your forms as templates, take a look at this FormsCentral video.

-    Rebecca Staley, Marketing Specialist, Acrobat Solutions

Instead of stacks of unwieldy paper documents, developers in the City of Sacramento are now submitting project documentation electronically with PDF for much easier review and distribution. By moving to a digital environment, the submittal, review, and approval process eliminates the need to output and handle thousands of pounds of unwieldy paper documents (some 13,000 building permit a year), saving time and money.

Using Adobe Acrobat Pro, engineers and developers can now submit plans electronically as a PDF. Since the staff will no long has to manually input information from the plans into the central database, electronic submissions decrease the possibility of introducing errors.

Even if only 25% of the plans are submitted in PDF, the Sacramento CDD estimates that it will save some 1,200 hours of labor previously used to receive, time-stamp, collate, and distribute documents. This time savings does not even include efficiencies associated with easier review, processing and archiving with the PDF files.

“Standardizing on Adobe Acrobat to simplify increasingly complex plan check reviews—involved in managing development projects—helps our agency make the City more economically competitive, resourceful, and vibrant,” says Matthew Sites, project manager, Community Development Department for the City of Sacramento.

To read more about how the City of Sacramento is using Adobe Acrobat, check out the full story here: http://adobe.ly/OmEiOH

Ali Hanyaloglu, senior marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions

Follow Ali on Twitter, @acroboy. 

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about some Adobe Acrobat customers who are taking advantage of the Adobe enterprise license agreement (ELA) and standardizing on Acrobat across their organizations. Because the ELA simplifies the entire licensing process they save time and money. And by standardizing on Acrobat across their companies they’re making deployment, updates, maintenance, and integration easier.

Two large government organizations are also taking advantage the ELA and standardizing on Acrobat. The U.S. Air Force has recently selected Acrobat X Professional as its standard, enterprise-wide PDF software. Using the premier PDF solution from Adobe, the Air Force can create higher-quality content while driving tighter collaboration and productivity, greater security and lower costs across the entire organization.

The Air Force cited several factors that led to adopting Adobe Acrobat as its PDF solution, with a three-year enterprise agreement, covering 600,000 seats. In addition to PDF creation capabilities, Adobe Acrobat delivers peace of mind by helping eliminate compatibility and other issues that drain valuable resources. Adobe Acrobat enables better software asset management and improved patch and update processes, which significantly reduces the effort and cost required to keep systems up-to-date.

Another large government agency, which I can’t name, entered into an ELA with Adobe recently, as well. The department consolidated software licenses for the most current versions of Acrobat X as well as LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, and Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Master Collection. They now have a standard PDF solution nationwide.

The ELA enables the department to consolidate more than 400 separate purchase orders into just a handful of annual purchases or renewals. The ELA saves a lot of time and helps to ensure that the latest software is deployed to employees needing it in a timely manner. In addition, the agreement positions the department to secure the lowest, most consistent price for the latest software and technology, creating massive savings year after year.

Using the ELA to deploy PDF solutions across your organization is a smart move and you’d be in good company. Check it out.

Mark Grilli, senior director of Acrobat Solutions product marketing

What can $0.99 get for you these days? Probably about half a cup of coffee, less than a third of a gallon of gas, or a single song for your iPod. Seems like that dollar bill won’t usually get you too far. Starting today, however, we’d like to add something to the list: for a limited time, $0.99 will get you a whole month of FormsCentral Basic.

For less than the price of a cup of coffee or a gallon of gas, you can take full advantage of the service offerings at FormsCentral: create up to 5 forms, accept payments through your form via PayPal, allow for skip logic and email notifications, and all the rest – for a full month. This is the perfect opportunity to get acquainted with the Basic features of FormsCentral, whether you’re a fan of the free version and want to test out a premium feature set or whether you’re new to FormsCentral and just want to see what it can do.

So the next time you’re buying yourself a cup of coffee or browsing the latest releases in iTunes, just think about where else you could put that one dollar bill to use. Check out more on this cool FormsCentral deal.

This offer is good for 30 days until September 22, 2012. Pricing is for one month only.

-       Rebecca Staley, Marketing Specialist, Acrobat Solutions

We recently conducted a study of the challenges and expectations of knowledge workers and IT. While the full results of the study aren’t ready yet – and I’ll share them with you here, among other places, when they are – there was one finding that stood out: the majority of organizations underestimate their overall information security risk as a vast majority of workers regularly collaborate with others outside their companies.

The implications of this are enormous. Leaked sensitive information damages your competitive advantage and erodes your customers’ and partners’ trust in you. And that, of course, hits the bottom line. IT departments can choose a user-friendly, document-level security solution to protect the company’s documents, inside and outside the firewall. For their part, users need the ability to secure documents with a solution that can easily integrate into the existing IT environment. That way, everybody’s happy.

Adobe Acrobat customers deal with document-level security risks all day long. We all remember the embarrassing high profile cases in which law firms or government agencies thought they’d deleted sensitive content only to find it on the front page of the NYTimes. However, using Acrobat, Andrew Moir, a partner at international law firm Herbert Smith, says “we know that information we need to keep confidential, stays confidential.”

Adobe Acrobat lets you remove sensitive data from documents before sharing them with others. The PDF redaction tools permanently delete confidential information, while sanitization tools remove hidden information with one click. Acrobat’s Guided actions also help ensure that all team members prepare documents for distribution correctly and consistently.

You can further mitigate the risk of sensitive information being leaked by controlling access to documents. “We need to control who accesses documents and give people the assurance that the materials they receive have not been altered,” says Margaret M. DiBianca, Associate, Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor

Young Conaway uses Acrobat to password-protect those documents with Acrobat’s 256-bit AES encryption technology to control access. The firm also sets file permissions to prevent editing, printing, or copying content. “With Acrobat, we can put controls on PDF files to limit access to information and restrict copying of data from files,” DiBianca adds. Acrobat also works with Adobe LiveCycle® Rights Management ES2 for extended rights management protection.

It’s also important to understand the role eSignatures play in security. Without an assurance that someone’s signature is the real deal, business could come to a screeching halt. That was one reason Adobe acquired EchoSign last year. With Adobe EchoSign eSignature and Web contracting services, you can send and receive digitally signed documents securely and quickly. EchoSign has been designed from the ground up for state-of-the-art ASP security. Electronic signatures are also protected by the federal ESIGN Act, which ensures that customers who sign contracts electronically are as protected as they would be had they opted for pen-on-paper agreements. You could argue the protections are even greater with digital contracts, since eSignature solutions can offer additional authentications from email, IP addresses, passwords, social network credentials and other safeguards that surpass anything possible with physical copies or fax transmissions.

What’s happening now is that Web contracting, which includes the automation of the entire contract process — from creation, collaboration, and execution to archiving and management — is quickly replacing the painful paper-based processes of the past with the advantages of working on the Web.

The main drivers of Web contracting and eSignatures are customers, partners, and internal users. Customers are increasingly comfortable conducting business via the Web and mobile devices, and they are demanding that companies move more of their customer-facing processes online. That, of course, adds a new dimension to security considerations.

So whether your security needs are redaction, rights management, access or secure e-signatures, Acrobat can provide a solution. There’s more information at the Acrobat IT Resource Center for insights into how to Acrobat can make your documents — and your IT operation — more secure.

Mark Grilli, senior director of Acrobat Solutions product marketing