Printers, overnight mail, scanners, and fax machines are killing business productivity. More and more organizations are moving away from paper-based approaches to their critical business processes to reduce costs, improve security, and limit environmental impact.  According to a recent Adobe study, “Paper: An Endangered Species?” the majority of managers surveyed had overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward paper-based processes and cited productivity, security, attracting talent and going green as the benefits of a completely digital workflow. The research is based on interviews with 1,051 U.S. managers in small, medium and large businesses that are responsible for creating or working with contracts.

Going Digital: Improving Business Processes

Adobe’s research shows that more than half of managers surveyed believe that digital approaches simplify work. Further, companies slow to adopt fully digital practices are at a disadvantage when it comes to growing their businesses and ultimately attracting new customers. For example:

• 51% of respondents said that a digital workflow makes filing and managing documents easier
• 61% of managers said working digitally saves on costs
• 32% said a digital workflow is more efficient, giving them an edge with client work and ultimately helps win new business

Paper-Based Contracts: a negative impact on trust

Our study also showed that paper impacts the trust that businesses have with partners, vendors and customers.  Unfortunately, this is particularly acute when it comes to the sanctity of contracts, the heart of business agreements:

• More than two-thirds believe that paper-based contracts are prone to defacing
• 60% of managers believe that password-protected electronic documents are more secure than paper documents locked in a safe
• 56% cited the fear of losing a paper document as the top “con” of using paper

Attracting talent and going green

Our study also pointed out a growing attitude among people that it’s more prestigious to work for a company that is mostly digital:

• 76% of respondents said they are impressed by companies that have a strong digital presence
• 71% said they wish their company was more digital
• 68% said that it is important for a company to operate mostly electronically versus on paper when they are deciding where to work

The last mile: moving to electronic contracts

While the vast majority of business processes – from small companies to large enterprises – have already gone digital, contracts represent the last mile for companies to go paperless. Our study showed that the tipping point for more businesses to transition to digital contracting may be on the horizon – respondents noted they would be highly interested in using an automated Web contracting tool that makes it easy to electronically sign, track and secure contracts:

• 98% of respondents noted they still use paper in their transactions involving contracts
• Only 18% having made the switch to purely digital methods when signing contracts
• 72% said a digital tool, such as an eSignature service, would fulfill a critical business need
• 73% of managers affirmed that life would be easier if all contracts exchanged at work were done digitally

Digital Contracts Streamline Business

Adobe believes that now is the time for all organizations to immediately evaluate how and if they can shift to digital approaches for contracting. eSignature technologies are easy, secure, and readily available. Organizations that use eSignatures are seeing a dramatic decrease in the time needed to close deals, reduced contract negotiation times, faster “quote-to-cash”, and a safer, more secure way to track and store some of their most critical business documents.   And all eSignatures are backed by the federal ESIGN Act, ensuring the legality of the contract, which should put the customer at ease.

For your “signees,” signing a contract is simple and easy.   They can sign from their mobile phone, their iPad, or any device connected to the Web – no more waiting by the fax machine or for that overnight envelope to arrive.

It’s easy to get more digital. Just check out Adobe EchoSign here for a free test drive.

Paper: An Endangered Species? (Study PDF)

Twitter: @jon_perera

Today we began shipping our newest and most powerful collaboration solution – Adobe Acrobat XI® with cloud services – and you can get it now at the Adobe store or your nearest Adobe reseller.

Adobe Acrobat XI has the capabilities to let you handle the most complex document challenges and help your IT department close the gap on the productivity inefficiencies that result from working with an ever-increasing number of documents. But more than that, Acrobat XI gives you easy access to our powerful cloud services for web contracting and online forms that will make doing business from anywhere a breeze.

Acrobat XI has the features you asked for and then some.  Features like making it easier than ever to edit PDF files and export to Microsoft PowerPoint; touch-friendly capabilities on tablets, and ensuring interoperability with Windows 7 and 8. Acrobat XI also lets you update text directly in PDF, automatically wrap paragraph text, search and replace words in a PDF file, and crop, adjust, or replace images, with the newly designed Edit Text and Images tool.

Customers tell us these features save hours of work.

“Using Acrobat XI, our marketing team can easily edit and fine‐tune text, images, and rich‐media content directly within a PDF presentation whenever and wherever they are, saving valuable time and costs of reworking materials,” said Jim Confalone, founder of ProPoint Graphics.

Better integration with our cloud services, Adobe EchoSign and FormsCentral, has also topped customer request lists, and with Acrobat XI, we made that possible. Using Adobe EchoSign, sales teams can now cut contract cycles and the time to close a deal from weeks to just hours. Think of what that means to your bottom line.  Bill Lunsford, graphics manager, BBDO Atlanta likes how it makes his day easier. “The new EchoSign features within Adobe Acrobat XI will streamline everyday tasks. These days, no one is going to stand at a fax machine to wait for approvals. Being able to electronically sign a PDF on cost estimates for a project will accelerate go‐to‐market schedules,” he said.

With Adobe FormsCentral, you get robust forms creation, data collection, and results analysis that customers are raving about. “The enhancements to FormsCentral within Acrobat XI make creating and distributing well-designed, interactive forms to exchanging information with clients and partners much easier,” said Bart van Wanroij, president of Microsoft software developer, Epona. “We especially love the new graphic representation of the form results summary in Acrobat XI. With FormsCentral capabilities in Acrobat XI, the road to collecting, analyzing, and ultimately reporting on data just became a lot shorter for Epona!”

We also made both Acrobat XI and the new Adobe Reader® XI touch enabled for use on tablet devices.  Now PDF files containing dynamic media content, as well as files in shared review and electronic signature workflows, can be managed from virtually anywhere. With the Reader XI for mobile app, iOS, Android™, and Windows 8 users can collaborate in ways not possible before — adding comments during review cycles, fully interacting with PDF and web forms, and participating in electronic signature workflows. Additionally, IT can now deliver Reader XI or Acrobat XI as a centrally-managed, touch-friendly, virtual application with improved support for Citrix.

Mike Mann, release and deployment analyst, at McGladrey, thinks the new touch-enabled Reader makes McGladrey staff more efficient. “Our employees use tablets to get work done on the go. With the new editing features supported in Adobe Reader for mobile devices, our employees will be able to review PDF files and make notes at any time, increasing productivity and encouraging adoption of mobile technology,” he said.

IT professionals are praising Acrobat XI for its tighter SharePoint and Office integration. “The integration of Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft SharePoint is greatly improving how the Juvenile Justice Partners manage, share, and publish juvenile case information,” said Susan Green, assistant CIO, at the San Diego County District Attorney’s office.

Acrobat XI also streamlines deployment and maintenance, which Rob Brawn, director for the Center of Project Excellence, CH2M Hill, thinks is a huge time saver. “It is a full time job to manage software updates and keep users current on software versions. Acrobat XI security enhancements minimize out‐of‐cycle patches, saving time for IT and the users,” he said. Acrobat XI also provides industry-leading security features and supports application virtualization via Citrix XenApp software to provide a low cost of ownership and sound return on investment.

If greater productivity, efficiency and better ROI top your list of goals for your organization, give Acrobat XI a look with a free 30-day trial for Windows or Mac. If you already know the benefits Acrobat brings to a business, and you’re ready “to go to 11,” upgrading is easy and starts at just $199 for Acrobat XI Pro. So what are you waiting for?

Important P.S. for LiveCycle Designer Users!

You’ve probably already heard that LiveCycle Designer will no longer be shipping with Acrobat XI. But don’t panic. For those of you who have been using LiveCycle Designer with Acrobat 8*, Acrobat 9 or Acrobat X and want to upgrade to the latest and greatest, we’re offering a free version of LiveCycle once you upgrade to Acrobat XI, just so you can keep on using the programs you’re used to working with. Just get in touch with us and let us know that you’ve upgraded to Acrobat XI. Our customer service representatives will be happy to provide you with the latest version of LiveCycle Designer so you can continue to get your work done as usual with Acrobat XI.

October 1 marks a major milestone for the Adobe Acrobat business. We’re launching Adobe Acrobat XI. Acrobat XI software with cloud services is a powerful new solution that rises to today’s complex document challenges for creating, consuming, sharing and securing PDF content across devices and platforms.

We’ve added several much-asked-for features that are aimed at making life easier for information workers like you. Acrobat XI features complete PDF editing and export to PowerPoint; touch-friendly capabilities on tablets; sophisticated web contracting with Adobe EchoSign; and forms creation, data collection and analysis with Adobe FormsCentral.

We’ve added features IT people have asked for, too:  seamless Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration, easy deployment, applications virtualization and robust application security to provide a low cost of ownership and sound return on investment.

The new Acrobat XI family includes Acrobat XI, Adobe Reader XI and newly integrated document services, Adobe FormsCentral and Adobe EchoSign.

It’s About Productivity

The explosion of digital documents in the workplace has created new challenges for productivity.  With Acrobat XI we’re taking on the issues that are dragging down individual and organizational productivity.

Each week, individual information workers spend half their time searching, filing, organizing, merging and editing comments, obtaining signatures, reviewing feedback and consolidating data, or collaborating with people outside their organizations. IT departments struggle with integrating and managing a diversity of platforms, devices and services, while trying to protect sensitive corporate IP and personal information.

Information workers are asking:  “How do I do what I was doing before, but work in this new environment?”

And organizations of all types are faced with adapting to this complexity, while driving their businesses forward, wondering: “How do I accelerate revenue, secure my IP and continue to evolve my workers capabilities to meet these new challenges?”

These productivity, collaboration, device and security issues have a significant impact on organizations. We’re calling this the Document Productivity Gap. The key to closing the gap is to recognize  that it is a set of compounding issues, multiple, little things that add up to have a big impact.

We asked IDC to take a closer look at these inefficiencies and the impact document-based challenges have on information workers and IT professionals.  One finding startled me. According to a recent global IDC white paper, sponsored by Adobe, the addressable impact of these inefficiencies on an organization of 1,000 employees is almost $16 million annually.  And those are the addressable gaps – not theoretical nirvana that is impossible to reach, but very realistic, tangible gaps that can be closed today. For example, if we could bridge the gap we could add 21.3 percent to an organization’s resources – or the equivalent of 213 employees for every 1,000 people at an organization.  Even if we recover just half of this productivity loss, it could equal hiring close to 100 new employees for a 1,000 person organization.  Imagine the impact of 100 new engineers, salespeople, marketers or IT professionals?

What “11” Means: Customers Weigh In

With the new release, we have made significant innovations across the desktop and the cloud to address the gap.  We wanted to:

• Enable information workers to unlock PDF content with comprehensive tools for both editing and content reuse.
• Accelerate document exchange using PDF and the web, forms data collection, review, approvals and eSignatures.
• Empower employees to be productive on the go with PDF on tablets and smartphones.
• Mitigate risk and lower IT costs with the most advanced document and application security.

It looks like we’ve succeeded. Acrobat XI has gotten high marks from customers that were in our beta program. These customers are typical of those dealing with the gap.

Security is high on the list for many. Mike Mann, release and deployment analyst at tax and finance consultancy, McGladrey, said, “Our client information is sensitive, so document security is critical. Acrobat XI offers advance document protection capabilities that are easier than ever for our staff to uniformly secure documents.”

Bill Lunsford of BBDO Atlanta likes the speed and efficiency he gets with the integrated services, especially EchoSign. “The new EchoSign features within Adobe Acrobat XI will streamline everyday tasks. These days, no one is going to stand at a fax machine to wait for approvals. Being able to electronically sign a PDF on cost estimates for a project will accelerate go-to-market schedules.”

Yvonne Willis, enterprise applications and project manager at Pillsbury Law, echoed that: “Security is the talk of the town. All of our clients expect the highest level of security, from our documents through our applications and IT environment. Acrobat XI provides key security enhancements that support both users and IT professionals.”

Regarding accelerating document exchange, Saul Morse, vice president of multichannel integration, Palio, said, “Acrobat XI now makes it even easier and faster to create PDF forms and to automatically distribute and collect information with new online forms services available within Acrobat XI.”

But BBDO Atlanta’s Lunsford summed up Acrobat XI best: “I leverage the heck out of Adobe Acrobat because I can cut down on the resources and my IT department loves me.”

Today is October 1. Mark it down as the day we close the gap.

Kevin M. Lynch, SVP and GM of Acrobat and Document Services, Adobe

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @LynchKevinM

The viewing figures for London Olympics on TV here in USA were bigger than ever for NBC.  Many pundits put this down to the enduring allure of Bob Costas but I think it was because the 2012 games were in a city familiar to so many people: dear olde London town.   I lived in London for 8 years before moving to California and the highlight of the games for me (apart from fellow Scot and fellow Edinburgh University alumni, cyclist Sir Chris Hoy, becoming the most successful British Olympian of all time) was seeing the city itself become an integral part of the games.  The best games are those where the city itself seems intertwined with the events – like Barcelona in 1992 or Sydney in 2000.

The BBC did a phenomenal job broadcasting the games in UK.   As a publicly funded network the BBC (or Auntie as Brits call it) had the luxury of 24 HD broadcast channels dedicated to the event, meaning virtually every minute of every event was broadcast on TV across UK.   You wanted to watch men’s handball, Iceland versus Argentina, you got it on your flat-screen in the living room (31-25 to the lads from the rapidly melting land in the north, BTW).  Interesting fun fact, the BBC’s mobile apps that complemented their outstanding TV-coverage were developed using Adobe PhoneGap.

The US broadcast market is a little bit different, to say the least, than its more homogeneous European counterparts.  The networks here are competing in a complex, competitive, highly fragmented and regionalized market. So, in short, no chance for 24 dedicated HD channels for the Olympics in USA!  NBC was faced with a much more difficult situation than their BBC colleagues and had to rely on streaming the events live to desktop and mobile devices to ensure every sport got its place in the sun (or this being London, a light drizzle).

And that’s where a technology like Adobe Pass can come into play.  Adobe Pass was the authentication glue that allowed cable and satellite subscribers to gain access to NBC’s comprehensive live steaming of events on their iPad, Android devices and desktop computers.  Folks just had to use their cable or satellite company billing email and password and log-in to NBC’s desktop web experience or dedicated mobile Olympic app.  Pass did the rest.  Not surprisingly NBC’s Olympic web site and apps became daily destinations for sports nuts, like me, to visit.

Our stream-meisters have an overview of all of this and of Adobe Pass 2.0, announced today, over at the Digital Media Blog.

It will be interesting to see how this will all play out for the Rio Olympics in 2016 (and more importantly the World Cup in Brazil in 2014).

More and more companies of all sizes are turning to electronic signatures to conduct business. They know eSignatures cut the time and costs associated with traditional paper-based processes.

That’s why we’re committed to making Adobe EchoSign the premier eSignature solution for today’s smart businesses. So today, we’re announcing several new features aimed at giving you greater control, greater flexibility and a peace of mind, so to speak.

With today’s announcement, all PDF files delivered from Adobe EchoSign will be certified with the Adobe CDS certificate, meaning that your document has not been altered or tampered with in any way. It is the genuine article. This is the kind of peace of mind that adds trust and confidence to your deals.

For more on this and the additional new features added today, check out today’s blog post from Mangesh Bhandarkar, Adobe EchoSign group product manager.

Late last year, Adobe EchoSign offered its first app for free download on the iTunes App Store. The release let iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users access their EchoSign accounts on their mobile devices with the same protections available on the Adobe EchoSign Web service.

Today, we make it even easier for the mobile workforce to incorporate Web contracting into their business activities and  increase productivity. With today’s enhancements, the Adobe EchoSign iOS app continues to make it even easier and legally binding to get documents signed digitally in minutes, rather than the days or weeks it might otherwise take via paper document delivery.

Check out the full blog post from Adobe EchoSign group product manager, Mangesh Bhandarkar, here for more details on what’s new today.

It’s wonderful to see all of the innovation happening across different product lines at Adobe. It’s even better when products can leverage and build on innovation from other parts of the company.

Today, Adobe announced the next release of Adobe Connect and Adobe Connect Mobile. Version 9 of Adobe Connect brings a strong focus on helping customers produce engaging webinars. Part of the release incorporates technology from other divisions to help solve customer problems.

Adobe Connect has always provided customers with an incredibly rich solution for marketing webinars. However, the live event is only part of producing a webinar. Customers want to promote their events using social media. They want to create landing pages to increase interest and register unknown users. They need to measure the success of their events and marketing campaigns.

The Adobe Connect team recognized that Adobe has been helping customers solve similar problems in other parts of the organization.

Adobe Connect 9 integrates Adobe CQ5 to ensure that customers can create stunning, and fully customizable micro-sites for promoting their events and registering users. The technology is also leveraged for email invitations, reminders and follow-ups to ensure consistency.

On the back-end, Adobe SiteCatalyst is used as an analytics engine to provide valuable feedback to marketers in terms of which marketing campaigns were most successful in driving people to the event. The same technology also helps organizations optimize every aspect of future webinars.

Adobe Connect Mobile in turn has leveraged Adobe’s advances in mobile authoring tools. Version 2.0 enables true device to device collaboration – giving meeting hosts the ability to manage virtually every aspect of a meeting room, virtual classroom or webinar. Meeting hosts can share documents, annotate whiteboards and other content, and manage the meeting from their tablet or smartphone.

Adobe Connect 9 is a great example of combining technologies from several parts of the organization to help customers solve problems.

Today, we are excited to reveal another major milestone in the integration of Adobe EchoSign technology with Adobe’s document solutions and services. Now, Adobe Reader users will be able to send PDF files to be signed from within the application as well as sign documents electronically themselves, making it easier than ever for businesses to “seal the deal” and keep up with the demands of a growing mobile workforce.  The new update makes Adobe Reader a one-stop shop for electronic signatures. Read more about it on the Acrobat Solutions blog.

We’re excited today to announce the immediate availability of the free Adobe EchoSign application for iOS devices.  We realize that you are doing more and more business over your mobile devices and tablets and we’re committed to helping you streamline your business processes and increase productivity.  Now, you can easily get access to you EchoSign accounts and sign documents directly from your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices.

For more details on the Adobe EchoSign app, check out the Acrobat Solutions blog or the view the press release.   And be sure to download the app now at the iTunes Stores. After all, it’s free. Happy Holidays!

We’re excited to announce that today we’ve updated Adobe FormsCentral with some of our customers’ most-asked-for features. Now, you no longer have to deal with the headaches of getting files and information from customers, clients, or vendors.  With the new File Attachments Field in FormsCentral, users can now collect and store one or more files (including audio and video) from respondents, making things like requests for proposals and resumes, easier to gather and manage. Everything is stored in one central place, taking the pain out of managing the collection process. In addition, the new Field Validation features let users set minimum and maximum values for the number of characters, dates or multiple choice fields within their forms – making life simpler for everyone involved. Check out the Acrobat Solutions blog to learn more about how today’s updates make it easier than ever to collect and organize data in such uses as applications, client intake, and registration forms.