Acrobat for Legal Professionals

September 25, 2007

Free DMS Integration Plug-in for Acrobat

Acrobat integration with Document Management Systems (DMS) is a key requirement of large law firms.

Unfortunately, many firms have been frustrated getting Acrobat to work with their DMS.

While the DMS vendors generally supply Acrobat integration, there are issues which affect customer deployment:

• Integration for the latest version of Acrobat may not be available until a new release of the DMS becomes available, which could take many months.
• Support for newer versions of Acrobat running on legend (older) versions of DMS software is seldom available.

Acrobat integration—while expected by large firms—isn’t a revenue generating activity for DMS vendors.

I shared this customer issue with Thaddeus Bouchard, the CTO of Omtool. Omtool offers AccuRoute, a document routing solution which I see at many large firms. This company has lots of expertise in DMS integration because AccuRoute works with just about every DMS available.

When Thaddeus said, “Hey, maybe we can work together on this problem . . .” I knew something good could happen!

Sometime before the end of October 2007, Omtool will offer a free download of the Swiftwriter plug-in for Acrobat.

Swiftwriter offers integration with the following DMS products:

• Interwoven/iManage FileSite/Desksite (versions 5.x through 8.2)
• OpenText/Hummingbird DOCSOpen (3.9.6 through 4.0)
• OpenText/Hummingbird DM5 through DM6
• World Software Worlddox GX
• Microsoft SharePoint 2003 and 2007

Read on to learn more about the Swiftwriter plug-in and some background information that you may find helpful.

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January 25, 2007

Enterprise Deployment of the Adobe Acrobat 8 Family

Adobe Acrobat 8 poses new opportunities—and some new challenges—for the IT staff of large organizations which need to deploy Acrobat to many users.

Adobe offers a new, completely re-written installation tool called the Adobe Customization Wizard for Acrobat 8.0. This tool allows you to create a Windows Installer Transform file (.MST) to modify Microsoft Installer files (.MSI).

On March 9, 2007, Adobe announced that we are discontinuing the Adobe License Manager . I consider this a win for customers!

This article covers two issues:

• I've already deployed Acrobat with ALM or I need non-ALM licenses to install. What do I do?
• How do I customize the installation of Adobe Acrobat?

I’ve included several links throughout this article which offer a deeper dive.

For the record, I’m not a deployment expert, so I cannot respond to technical questions about this topic.

Read on to learn more about common deployment questions…

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