If you’re in a self-indulgent mood, check out the latest offer from the ExportPDF team: starting today, you can refer friends to ExportPDF to earn cold, hard cash (to help you afford that getaway, perhaps?). Not only are you getting a little boost, your friends will be introduced to the ExportPDF service to help edit PDF content in their day-to-day work life. You’ll be doing them (and yourself) a favor.

Here’s how it works: For every one of your friends who signs up for a new ExportPDF subscription, you’ll be rewarded with a cool $5.00; signing up one friend will get you a tasty treat from the bakery next door, and signing up 20 friends will get you to go out to dinner at that new restaurant you’ve been dying to try. Why hold back? You’ve earned this. Learn more and get started at https://www.acrobat.com/exportpdf/en/referral/epdf_referral_landing.html

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.

The fact is, most of us in this tech-crazy, content consuming world have many, many different ways to store, save, and savor our information, and we can do it from just about anywhere with a decent wireless or WiFi signal. The mobile platforms we use daily (phone, tablet, laptop) might allow us to get more work done than ever before, because we can do our work in a cab, on a train, or standing in line waiting for our next gadget to be released. But what if we could do our work without subscribing to, say, 21 different applications? What if there was a simple system that we could use to get actual, bona fide work done without taking a voice memo to transcribe later on, or writing an email reminder to ourselves on a tiny keyboard?

Enter Adobe’s Document Services.

We’ve been working maniacally back here at the mothership to support a mobile mode of working that constitutes getting real work done: real contracts getting signed, real forms being filled and sent, real comments made on digital documents – no matter where you are. With Adobe’s Document Services, such as Adobe EchoSign, Adobe FormsCentral, and the Acrobat.com cloud storage system, you can hit the road with nothing but your favorite tablet and be sure that you won’t miss a deal for having left your laptop at home. Here’s just one example: Adobe EchoSign’s mobile app lets you upload documents and send them off to be signed; you can even use the Adobe Reader application to fill out a form and apply your signature to a PDF document before you send it off for another signature with the EchoSign app. Even better, your account activity is tracked even when you’re on a mobile device so no information about the transaction is lost; when you sign into your account from another computer, you’ll see all of your activity has been securely transcribed for your records.

Okay, great, you’re saying; signatures on mobile devices sound awesome. But what if you’ve got a 150-page PDF document that you’re reading or reviewing in Adobe Reader on your laptop, and you’ve suddenly got to leave the house before you’re done reading? No problem: save the document to your Acrobat.com account, and access it from your phone while you’re on the bus to wherever you’re going; when you open the document from Acrobat.com, your place has been saved and you can pick up right where you left off while in transit.

We know how fast things move these days, and we know how fast you’re moving, too; Adobe’s Document Services and mobile applications help you stay on top of things even when you’re only at your desk for 30 minutes a day. Download the free Adobe Reader app for iOS and Android devices, and see how much more efficient you become next time you’re sitting in a waiting room or in a coffee shop. We think you may even be able to delete some of those extra apps.

- Rebecca Staley

The recently released Adobe-commissioned IDC white paper analyzed the current productivity challenges that IT and information workers face in today’s age of digital documents. The study also identifies opportunities for increasing information worker productivity.

With new and improved PDF editing, cloud services integration and enhanced tablet capabilities, Acrobat XI addresses today’s complex document challenges and the problems that compromise the productivity of information workers and IT departments.

Today’s video is all about converting PDF files. Acrobat XI makes it even easier to convert a PDF file into a Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document that you can quickly edit and reuse. Don’t be scared, check it out!

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

Over the years, the prerelease program has provided us with tremendous insight into what works and what doesn’t, what customers like and what they don’t like, and help finding possible bugs.

That early feedback has helped us build applications that are used by millions of people around the world in their everyday work to create compelling content across media and devices, anytime, anywhere.

You don’t have to be code-savvy; you just have to want to help. Prerelease participants have all kinds of experience.  So if you think you’ve got what it takes, and you’re interested in testing future versions of Adobe products, apply here.

Chris French, senior product manager, Acrobat

CreatePDF Team edition is perfect for business and creative professionals. Now everyone on the team can convert an unlimited number of files to PDF and get special pricing with one single annual subscription. Bottom line: No one has to rely on one person to create PDF files.

What’s more, with Adobe CreatePDF you’re certain that your important documents look and stay the way you want them to because PDF files are accessible on hundreds of millions of desktops worldwide with Adobe Reader.

Annual subscriptions to CreatePDF are available in packages of five, 10, 25, 50 and 100. Prices are as low as $5.49 per user per month. You get a bonus seat at no charge when you buy a subscription. So that five-pack becomes a six-pack and so on.

With CreatePDF Team edition:

• The more you buy, the more you save. Get a higher discount with more seats.
• Easily add, delete or view members of your team with the Team Administrative Page.

Check out CreatePDF and give everyone the freedom to create, and edit PDF files while saving on business costs.

William Lau, senior product marketing manager, Acrobat Solutions.

For the full article, go take a look at the PDF for Lawyers: http://www.pdfforlawyers.com/2011/10/adobes-sendnow-is-quite-useful-for-lawyers.html

William Lau

Senior Product Marketing Manager