Back in the olden days when we all worked with paper documents and read paperback books, the matter of keeping our place in a multiple-page document was straightforward: dog-ear the page, or add a bookmark. If that bookmark falls out, though… well, you’ll be digging through that document saying to yourself “I think the last sentence I read started with the word ‘also’…”. A pain in the neck, and a waste of your time.

Nowadays, we’ve got simpler ways of keeping track of our documents and our progress within them. If you’re reading a PDF file in Adobe Acrobat, for example, you can place bookmarks the same as ever (and these ones won’t fall out); you can also use the navigation bar to jump straight to a page in the middle of the document. Our challenge now is this: what happens when you close that document and reopen it on a different device? You don’t want to have to remember where you were and have to flip to the right page, and you definitely don’t want to have to do that every time you reopen that 60-page contract full of legal-speak.

Today’s solution is Acrobat.com. If you’re using Acrobat or Reader 11.0.1 (the latest and greatest), you can now set your preferences to allow for picking up right where you left off. Read through that contract at your own pace; if, at page 43, you find you need to leave your desk for an appointment across town, upload the document to Acrobat.com with a single click. Then, from the train or the cab or the waiting room, use Adobe Reader Mobile on your tablet or smartphone to open that document from Acrobat.com – and you’ll see that the document opens to the same spot you’d left it when you uploaded it from your desktop computer. Now your page number is just one less thing to think about – with no bookmarks to keep track of.

We released our “Patch Tuesday” update to Acrobat & Adobe Reader earlier this week.

For information on the security updates see Security Bulletin APSB13-02 for details.
For detailed Release Notes, please see the Enterprise Toolkit.

A few highlights to be aware of:

New Updater Mode Added to Acrobat XI for Windows
The Adobe Acrobat XI for Windows updater now has a fully-automated mode. As a reminder, “fully-automated” mode will regularly check for important updates, download them to your machine, and install them automatically. When finished, you will be alerted via a small message in the system tray that your software has been updated. This method is the recommended best practice for keeping Adobe Acrobat up-to-date and more secure given the fact that it does not require user intervention.

Handling Flash in 10.1.5
As mentioned in Three Common Adobe Reader and Acrobat Security Questions, unknown Flash will now be rendered by the system Flash Player (NPAPI version), when using Adobe Reader and Acrobat 10.1.5. Note: This has already been done for Reader and Acrobat 11. As stated before, this means that Adobe Reader/Acrobat 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.

And as a reminder, support for Adobe Acrobat 9.x will end on June 26, 2013.

IDC recently undertook a large global survey of information workers and IT professionals on behalf of Adobe to better understand the productivity challenges that cost information workers time, and put a dollar value on that unproductive time. The bottom line: conservatively, the cost to an organization of 1,000 employees is nearly $16m a year.

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

In conjunction with this week’s announcement of Adobe Acrobat XI, we asked IDC’s Melissa Webster to take a closer look at the document-based challenges information workers and IT professionals face on a daily basis. The research resulted in a global IDC white paper that examined how productivity, collaboration, device and security issues have a significant impact on organizations. We’re calling this the “Document Productivity Gap.” The infographic below illustrates the top findings in the white paper.

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.

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:

• Demonstrate the ROI of all technology investments.
• Ensure solutions don’t indirectly drive up the cost of IT, such as more help-desk calls, unnecessary additions to the IT footprint, or difficult deployments which strain IT resources.
• Buy solutions that fit within the IT infrastructure. Because of the large investment within existing systems, any solution that doesn’t fit within the established standards requires a very strong business justification.
• Acquire programs that can enhance the value of existing infrastructure by driving higher usage are appealing.

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

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.

Quantitative Research

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:

• Enhance existing systems and processes to increase organizational productivity
• Help safeguard systems and data
• Easy deployment and management across the entire enterprise
• Quick data collection using fillable PDF forms
• Streamline PDF tasks
• Expedite document reviews and approvals

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