Recently in General Category

Although not conferences specifically tailored to the AEC professional, there are two events fast approaching in which Adobe Acrobat will receive top billing.

The first event is the Adobe Acrobat and PDF Central Conference scheduled for September 22-24 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's a great way to learn more about how Adobe Acrobat and PDF can solve your most critical business needs.

Several Adobe product specialists like Lisa Croft, Paul Gilbertson and PDF gurus like Ted Padova, Duff Johnson, Angie Okamoto, Bob Connolly, Thom Parker and others will be there to present and meet with Acrobat users itching to learn more.

Details are at http://www.pdfcentralconference.com/

The registration fee for the 2- day conference is $395, however if you become a member of the Acrobat User Community (Free) you will get $100 off the registration. You can't beat that!

So if you like go to: http://www.acrobatusers.com/events/1918/adobe-acrobat-pdf-central-conference to learn more.

The second event is the Adobe MAX conference. Scheduled for Oct 4th though the 7th in Los Angeles California. The conference offers hundreds of sessions and hands-on labs for designers, developers, and anyone interested in learning more about Adobe suite of products.

A couple weeks ago my wife and I had the honor of visiting the Victory Junction Gang Camp and making an Adobe software donation.  The Victory Junction Gang Camp was founded by Kyle and Pattie Petty, in honor of their son Adam, to provide life changing camping experiences to kids with chronic medical conditions or serious illness.  The VJGC is a non-profit organization and relies on the generous donations of individuals and organizations.  The have a full 24 hr production studio on-site that captures photos and videos of the campers and their experiences all through the week and then provides them to the campers and the parents as they depart.  I would like to share our experience and our tour with Pronto, the camp director, as the camp is truly an engineering feat in itself.

This past fall I spent some time speaking to several colleges in Texas about including Acrobat 3D in their engineering labs so that students could take advantage of being able to convert their 3D projects into a pdf format that could be shared with anyone with the FREE Adobe Reader.  I thought it would be a good way of students being able to communicate with their other colleagues and professors, but also be able to take their models or projects with them and still be able to view and share them without having the native software.  I was very surprised in the response from department heads in that most told me in one form or another that "we teach principles, we don't teach technology!"  It was not that we were asking them have a course on Acrobat 3D just the ability for students to simply drag and drop models into Acrobat and convert them into a pdf document that gave them 100x compression and the ability to share with others.  Most understood the value proposition, but then there was one university that just stood out from the rest and that was Texas State University.

We will be at the daratechPLANT 2008 conference held January 28-30th at the Wyndham Greenspoint Hotel in Houston, Texas.  I am excited that we will have a table top this year that we will be able to give software demonstrations and show you specific funtionallity that we have been putting into our applications that address your specific business needs. The three product we will be demonstrating are Acrobat, Acrobat Connect and LiveCycle.  As stated on the conference page, communication, interaction and interoperability are key industry issues.  Stop by and let us show you how we can address this specific issues.  I will post a conference report after the conference.

I recognize that a lot you come to this blog for general Acrobat information and are unfamiliar with some of the terminology that I am using in my posts.  The first thing you should know is my position at Adobe and my background.  I am currently working as the Business Development Manager for the Architectural, Engineering and Construction industry vertical at Adobe.  My background is that I am a civil engineer and have worked in heavy and process construction, oil & gas, and consulted for technology implementation for large capital facilities.  So let's talk terminology. ..