Barnaby James

September 30, 2006

PDFCasting with Acrobat / Reader 8.0

Acrobat Tracker

Ted Padova has a useful how to article on using the Tracker in Acrobat to read blogs. Many people are surprised when they find out Acrobat 7.0 has an RSS reader in it - who ordered that? While it's true that RSS is most closely associated with keeping up to date with blogs, it can be used for tracking changes in many sources of information - for example workflow notifications, updates to documents, important sets of forms etc. Today, a lot of this information is sent around in email largely because it's universally available - in a lot of cases it's not the best tool for the job. For example, if a workflow item changes state 10 times that might generate 10 notification emails because you can't modify an email once it has been sent. FeedBurner has a report that highlights the potential of using RSS for content distribution.

The Tracker is designed to be a client for this type of information - with RSS you subscribe to a service that publishes this information as a feed. RSS and ATOM are open formats for feeds that can be easily generated using blogs, wikis, social bookmarking tools or just a text file on a server. By using an open format, Tracker can easily integrate with other products - the idea is that end users can just plug things together and they will work.

What's new with Tracker in Acrobat / Reader 8.0

The two big changes in Tracker for 8.0 are that Tracker is now available in Reader and that enclosures are supported. Enclosures are like email attachments associated with each item in the feed that can be binary files (like video or audio). Of more interest to Acrobat / Reader users, this content can be PDF documents that will be automatically downloaded to the local machine when the feed is updated. This is particularly useful for people who are occasionally disconnected from the network or who work with large documents because their documents and workflows are immediatly available when they need them. Some examples where this might be useful:

• A set of forms used within a company (such as PTO and Expense Reports) could be published as a feed that employees can subscribe to. When an updated PTO form becomes available, the feed is updated so that the enclosure point to the URL of the PTO form. This will cause the old form to be removed and a new version downloaded automatically. You could imagine the IRS publishing all of the tax forms as a feed so you always have the latest one when you need it.
• A sales organization can publish documents for marketing collateral and price lists to make sure that all of the salespeople always have the most current version. An example of this type of workflow is Spanning Partners Spanning SalesForce that provides RSS feeds to data within SalesForce.com including documents.
• A service could generate a feed with a personalized set of Shared Review documents that need to be reviewed by specific users. Shared Reviews (like Tracker) have the ability to work completely disconnected from the network.
• A service could publish a feed of documents requiring approval for each user. For example, Approver.com does document approval workflows with RSS feeds.
• Journals / serialized books can be published as articles in a feeds (or you could subscribe to a feed which is a collection of articles you may find interesting from a variety of sources). For example, a law firm could distribute WestLaw and Lexis articles customized to each persons practice area.

I created a sample PDFCast (the term is a derivative of Podcasting) to show how this works - the link below will add the subscription to the Tracker (you need Acrobat / Reader 8.0 for this to work).

Here's a screen shot of what it looks like:

Clicking on the PDF icon on the left or the open button will cause the document to be opened from the local copy of the enclosure. In this particular case, I added some custom metadata to the feed and used some of the customization features of Tracker to group articles based on the value of that metadata. The UI and behavior of feeds in Tracker can be extensively customized - I'll cover this in a later blog post but it's all described in the Tracker SDK.

My lackluster blogging

Well I officially stink at keeping this blog going - I guess going to ETech put me behind a bit! Actually, getting Acrobat / Reader 8.0 finished is more likely the cause - at any rate, as the product is now announced, I have a little more time to talk about some of the new features that have been keeping me busy.

And for the sake of completeness, ETech was really interesting - well worth going. Audio for many of the sessions is now available from ITConversations - I particularly enjoyed Sam Ruby's Neurotransmitters talk, Eric Bonabeau's talk on Hunch Engines and the Roomba fighting.