Today, we announced the availability of Adobe Reader and Acrobat X (10.1.4) and 9.5.2. For more information regarding the security details in these releases, please see Security Bulletin APSB12-16. For detailed Release Notes, please see the Release Notes Library.
Steve Gottwals, Group Product Manager
Piscine Castiglione, the commercial arm of A&T Europe, recently adopted Adobe Acrobat X Pro to develop high-impact documentation and digital brochures for its Myrtha pool product line. The compelling product catalog—called “Encyclopedia”—in PDF contains more than 200 pages, 400 videos, 13 chapters, and photo presentations that can be viewed across devices. With built-in support for multiple file formats, Adobe Acrobat X Pro makes it easy for Piscine to add new content as soon as it’s available, whether it is text, images, or videos.
General Director Roberto Colletto of Piscine Castiglione says navigating through the detailed product information is quick and easy, “Moving from one section of the document to another is very similar to web navigation. The functionality of Adobe Acrobat X helped us develop a brochure that makes it easy for sales staff to communicate with customers efficiently, with accuracy, and leverage high-quality images and videos for more dramatic impact.” The company has even seen routine requests for additional information from customers drop because the interactive catalog covers so many topics in great detail.
For Piscine Castiglione, the Adobe solution has enhanced the impact of presentations by sales agents to customers and resellers. Now, agents can bring laptops or tablets along to sales calls and show customers polished, multimedia presentations on demand. With the help of Adobe Acrobat X Pro to create and deliver powerful product information, Piscine is further strengthening its image as an industry leader and innovator. Says Colletto, “Using Adobe Acrobat X…nicely mirrors our commitment to innovation.” To learn more about Piscine Castiglione and its use of Adobe Acrobat X, click here.
Ali Hanyaloglu, senior marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions
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- Rebecca Staley
I’m not certain what drives some users to clamor for the latest software. Maybe it’s about keeping up with the Joneses or just the thrill of having something new. Regardless, it wreaks havoc on an IT department. Managing multiple versions of software is a headache. It complicates licensing, deployment, updates, maintenance, integration, and in the end, drains your IT budget.
What’s more, IT life isn’t likely to get any simpler. The perfect storm looks to be on the horizon. A recent study by the Accenture Institute for High Performance and reported by Mike Vizard of ITBusinessEdge suggests that IT departments are “likely to be shaped more by forces outside the control of the IT organization” than by the IT department itself.
While we wait for the big blow, there are a lot of squalls IT has to navigate just to get through the day. I came away from some recent customer visits with this list of IT challenges they face:
So why make IT more complicated than it needs to be? Companies like yours have standardized on Adobe Acrobat to address many of these pain points. They simplified the licensing that supports enterprise-wide deployment and with that software license management. They benefit from enterprise-wide maintenance and support that helps them get the most out of the investment. Plus, Acrobat integrates easily to the IT environment.
For example, Arup, a global engineering and design firm, standardized its operations on the latest version of Acrobat using the Adobe enterprise license agreement (ELA) to distribute software to employees worldwide through the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager suite—a virtual software store. Arup employees can simply request Acrobat, submit the request for approval, and IT support will download the software directly to their desktops in an automated process.
For RSM McGladrey, a tax and assurance consultancy, the enterprise program with Adobe streamlined Acrobat licensing and deployment on an ongoing basis. Today, the company spends about two hours annually tracking and updating Acrobat software licenses—a 98 percent decrease over the previous time spent by IT.
Similarly, since moving to the enterprise contract, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers has reduced IT maintenance and administrative costs because everyone throughout the agency is using the same version of Acrobat. In addition, predictable budget requirements result in more effective fiscal planning.
Bottom line, by standardizing on Acrobat across your IT environment you can save a lot of time and money. Check out the Adobe ELA to see where you can cut costs and save time.
Mark Grilli, senior director of Acrobat Solutions product marketing
I get a lot of great questions regarding Adobe Acrobat and Reader security. Recently, a few have been asked more frequently than others. So, I thought I’d share those with you.
Q: What is the Adobe Acrobat and Reader update schedule?
About three years ago, we moved to a quarterly update schedule for Adobe Reader and Acrobat. It was part of a major initiative to strengthen the security of our products. At the time, three-month update cycles seemed like the right cadence given the threat environment and the pace we were adding new mitigation capabilities into the products. Fast-forward three years, and technologies like Protected Mode in Adobe Reader and Protected View in Acrobat (sandboxes) have provided effective layers of defense, reducing the need for the ongoing quarterly cadence.
So, recently we announced a closer alignment with the Microsoft Patch Tuesday model. Instead of delivering updates on a quarterly schedule, we will provide Adobe Acrobat and Reader updates on the second Tuesday of any given month as needed throughout the year to best address customer requirements and keep all of our users safe. We will also continue to publish a prenotification on the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team blog three business days before we release a security update, and we will continue to be flexible and respond “out-of-cycle” to urgent needs, such as a zero-day attack.
Q: How is Flash content being handled in Adobe Acrobat and Reader?
Starting with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.5.1, we have classified Flash content into two categories, “known” and “unknown.” Known Flash content has been authored by Adobe and ships with the product. For instance, Portfolio Navigators and user interface elements are classified as known Flash content. Unknown Flash content has been authored outside of Adobe and does not ship with the product. For example, Custom Portfolio Navigators and Flash content embedded into PDFs are considered unknown. With this classification scheme, we are able to selectively render Flash content with different Flash Players. In 9.5.1 and later, we render known Flash content with an internal component embedded inside of Adobe Reader and Acrobat, and let the system Flash Player (NPAPI version) render the unknown content.
Since an attack would leverage unknown, as opposed to known, Flash content, this means that Adobe Reader/Acrobat 9.x users will no longer have to update Adobe Reader/Acrobat each time we update the Flash Player. This is particularly beneficial to customers in managed environments, because fewer updates means a lower cost of ownership, while maintaining a vigilant security posture. Keeping in mind that there is no silver bullet when it comes to security, we do follow a defense-in-depth security strategy. Therefore, even though we run all Flash content inside the sandbox in Adobe Reader and Acrobat X, where we’ve had great success thwarting attacks, we’ll still implement this new handling of Flash content into those products in the future. We’ll let you know when that happens.
Q: Can you explain the new security ratings?
In the past, security ratings were based on the worst-case scenario of a vulnerability without taking into account the presence or likelihood of an exploit. For a bit of background, a vulnerability is a code defect that can potentially be leveraged by an exploit to attack a system. Imagine the exact same code defect in two products. One product has a known exploit, while the other product has extra layers of defense that thwart the exploit from working. If you only consider the vulnerability, the security rating would look the same. But, if you consider the presence (or lack) of a functioning exploit as part of the security rating, you’ll get a different answer, and a better understanding of the threat, which in turn, provides better guidance on how quickly you should deploy the update.
This has happened with the introduction of new security mitigation technologies, like Adobe Reader Protected Mode (sandbox protections), which has made vulnerabilities much more difficult to exploit. Therefore, we’ve taken the degree of difficulty for exploit creation and included it in our new update priority ratings. We feel that this is the best way to clearly communicate real-world risk associated with the vulnerabilities addressed in any given security update.
Steve Gottwals, Group Product Manager, Adobe Acrobat Solutions Security
That question comes up often when I’m on the road, especially from companies looking for ways to reduce the costs of running their IT operations. Which is pretty much everyone I visit these days. It stems from the common IT pain point of having to do more with less and being sure your IT investments are going to the right places. I like this quote from InformationWeek’s Eric Lundquist, commenting on a recent MIT Sloan Conference, where academics and in-the-trenches CIOs and IT execs debated the merits of risk taking: “Rampart storming may work for startups with no legacy to consider, but for larger companies IT investment is more about making the right bets.” These days, common sense rules.
But back to the question. Can Acrobat save you money? Short answer is yes. Adobe Acrobat and its free companion, Adobe Reader, can have a positive impact on return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) across the enterprise. But don’t take my word it.
Customers from a variety of businesses are finding that Adobe Acrobat is a proven solution that helps reduce IT cost and complexity. For example, tax consultancy, McGladrey, expects to save $600,000 over four years by standardizing on Acrobat, and that, they said, did not even begin to factor in all the IT time and effort saved.
Pharmaceuticals company, Astellas Pharma, who introduced Acrobat via the Adobe Volume Licensing program, which best suits large purchases, achieved cost reductions and centralized license management. “We can upgrade without incurring any other charges when a new version is released during the agreement term. This is extremely valuable to us,” said Shuichi Hiraki, associate manager of Infrastructure, Information Systems for Astrellas.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said that in addition to saving $1.3 million in licensing costs in the first year, it estimates it will reduce costs by $750,000 per year by reducing the number of purchase transactions from more than 500 to a single transaction each year.
Recently, we commissioned the Forrester Consulting Group to look into the question, too. The study, “Total Economic Impact™ Study of Adobe Acrobat X,” looked at seven current Adobe Acrobat X customers and identified a series of IT and end user productivity costs savings by standardizing on Acrobat X. These include reimaging systems cost savings, end user productivity gains from more efficient patch deployments, IT cost savings in managing patch rollouts, and cost savings from converting PDF to Microsoft Word or Excel.
Based on the interviews, Forrester created a financial analysis for a composite organization of 1,000 Adobe Acrobat X users. Over three years, the IT staff time that the composite organization devoted to patch testing and release declined from seven months (pre-Acrobat X) to three weeks (with Acrobat X). IT also saved three hours per machine on hardware reimaging by automating the deployment of Acrobat X using Microsoft SCCM. The three-year, risk-adjusted ROI for Forrester’s composite company was 112 percent, with a breakeven point (payback period) after deployment of 11.8 months.
The Forrester study helped confirm some things we already know about how Acrobat X can benefit an IT organization:
Mike Vizard of IT BusinessEdge wrote recently, “Most companies are looking for a way to do what they have always done more efficiently rather than experimenting with something totally new and different no matter how much upside potential there might be.” If this is you, stay tuned.
In future posts, I’ll look at some of the topics from the Forrester study and pass along what customers are saying about the impact Acrobat is having on their IT organizations. In the meantime, check out the Acrobat IT Resource Center for tips and tricks and insights into how to make Acrobat work for your IT shop.
Mark Grilli, senior director of Acrobat Solutions product marketing
