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.

Today is Earth Day, and in 2011 we are encouraged by the Earth Day Network to join its “people-powered” campaign of pledging our acts of environmental service, with the goal of reaching a billion Acts of Green by 2012. It’s no secret that as a company, Adobe has been at the forefront of implementing green operating practices – in fact, we were the world’s first business to achieve four Platinum-level certifications for energy and environmental design excellence by the U.S. Green Building Council.

This year I also find myself reflecting on the various ways that our enterprise technology helps organizations leverage green business practices that ultimately help them decrease their environmental footprint, while increasing business efficiency and connecting people across geographies and time zones.

Acrobat solutions allow our customers to reduce the use of paper documents, while Adobe Connect makes it possible for people to collaborate and communicate globally in real time, helping reduce business travel and its related environmental impact.

For example, the U.S. Government Printing Office was able to save 20 million tons of paper over five years by using Acrobat and LiveCycle to generate, authenticate and share documents electronically. Adobe Connect enabled more than 50,000 SAP employees to communicate around the world instantly, reducing the company’s travel by as much as 90%.

And all along we have been focused with our Customer Experience Management platform on delivering highly personalized, engaging online interactions between enterprises and their customers to power great customer experiences that build brand loyalty without all the environmental damage caused by burning fuel for worldwide travel and wasting paper when electronic means would suffice.

That’s why I found it so interesting when I heard recently about an acquaintance who received a personal, handwritten note – not a personalized email – from leading online retailer Amazon.com, thanking him for his business over the past nine years.  That act of personal outreach had a marked impact.  He not only felt valued by Amazon.com after receiving this note, he now associates a human face with the company.

Can this be done in more environmentally friendly ways?  Of course it can.  Record a quick Flash video and send it on to someone you want to thank.  Send them a personalized PDF portfolio complete with pictures of past experiences together.  The Amazon story is about personal touch – about a real person inside a company reaching out to another real person to establish trust and loyalty.  Just because we are using greener means to communicate doesn’t mean we have to lose the essence of one-to-one personal communication.  In fact in many cases the technology allows us to do it more effectively.

This act of a real person at Amazon.com reaching out to a customer in a very personal way underscores the desire for us to connect with each other, even in our always-on, always-connected online business and personal lives.

We have powerful technology that enables us to know our customers and connect across geographies without the need to ever leave our offices — and that’s a great thing. Yet, we shouldn’t forget that behind the technology lie people.

And so on this Earth Day, I’m going to follow the “people-powered” examples of the Earth Day Network and leverage our great technologies to send something personal – you should do the same!

– Rob

Follow me on Twitter for more perspectives.

While the World Cup winners are still a few vuvuzelas away, Acrobat has captured gold at the 2010 Effie Awards for its dynamic PDF work with ESPN on the NCAA’s Ultimate Tourney Guide.

Enabling fantasy basketball fans to become the most valuable players in their offices, users experienced the many dynamic PDF capabilities of Acrobat throughout the tournament. Instead of offering the static tournament bracket for download, ESPN used the Adobe Acrobat 9 interactive PDF format to dynamically update the desktop file with real-time feeds of news, video and game results during the NCAA tournament.

Besides taking gold in Effie’s Media Innovations category, the Adobe Acrobat 9 collaboration with ESPN and the NCAA resulted in 229,275 PDF downloads and 22,794 Reader 9 downloads.

Experience Acrobat 9 yourself to see what all buzz is about by downloading it here.

Like everyone, I sign stuff, lots of stuff — NDAs, contracts, and all sorts of other documents. I always find myself frustrated with the signature process.

The simple act of signing doesn’t particularly bother me. It’s all the mundane tasks that need to be completed before and after signing that drive me batty.

First, I typically receive the document to be signed in electronic form — meaning I need to print it out to sign it. Then, I need to figure out how to get it back to the other party. In some cases, I might need to find an overnight envelope, fill-in the address form, stick the document in the envelope, seal the envelope, and then find a drop box. Depending on where I am, this could take up to an hour, round trip. (Did you know that people spend $7.4B/year overnighting documents just because a signature is needed?)

Or in some cases, I need to fax it back. Faxing might be quicker, but it’s no easier: (1) create a cover sheet, (2) print the cover sheet, (3) fill in the receiving parties information, and (4) walk down to the fax machine and stand next to it waiting for the transmission to complete. But wait, I’m not done — the person whom I’ve faxed it to usually wants an ‘original copy’! So now I’m back to hunting for an overnight envelope…

Oh brother.

There’s got to be a better way. Why can’t we just sign things electronically? In this Internet age, signing something really should be as easy and fast as sending an email.

It turns out that Adobe already has a big, well established business providing a highly secure digital signature capability into large banks, the military and a number of governments. In fact, we’re a market leader in digital signatures. The first digitally signed judicial order was executed using Adobe technology as was the FY 2011 US Federal Budget. We’ve built a digital signature capability into Adobe® Acrobat® and we have a server-side technology called Adobe® LiveCycle® that supports digital signatures in automated workflows. This type of digital signature requires sophisticated computer infrastructure that’s often beyond the reach of small businesses and individuals. And therein lies the opportunity — take our LiveCycle signature technology, put it in the cloud and simplify it to make it easy for everyday signatures.

Today we’re announcing the beta release of this service. We’re calling it Adobe eSignatures™. We wanted to create something that was easy to use, fast, accessible to anyone with an internet connection and a browser, and that wasn’t overloaded with complicated features.

The service is really convenient. Just go to Adobe eSignatures and sign-in. There you’ll find a very simple guided process that allows you to upload a PDF, designate the email address of the other party, and click to sign. You don’t need any special tokens or smartcards.

Unlike paper documents, when a document is executed using Adobe eSignatures, it is certified to provide additional assurance that the document has not changed since it was signed. If you subsequently open the document in Adobe® Reader® or Adobe Acrobat you’ll see a blue ribbon at the top of the screen. If someone modifies a document after it has been signed, Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat will detect that something has changed and the blue ribbon will no longer appear.

Adobe eSignatures complies with both the US ESign Act of 2000 and the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA). According the US ESign Act, “signatures and records cannot be denied legal validity simply because they are electronic.”

So give it a try and let us know what you think. There’re a few things that we’d like to add to the service, but we want to hear from you first so that we can know what things are most important. We hope you’ll find our new service easy and convenient and we hope you’ll use it for all of your everyday signature tasks.

I look forward to hearing from you,
Paul McNamara
Entrepreneur in Residence, Cloud Computing

We recently introduced the latest version of Acrobat.com and told you all about it here. We hope you’ve read up on what’s new with Acrobat.com and perhaps already given the newest version a whirl. However, you still may not be familiar with how Acrobat and Acrobat.com can work together.

Check out this post from Dave Stromfeld on the Acrobat product management team blog to learn about how Acrobat and Acrobat.com work together to streamline forms processes and document reviews, among other things. Dave also includes pointers to other posts and video tutorials on the subject.

If you’re interested in what the Acrobat team is up to, follow some of the team members on twitter: @acro_dave, @acroboy, @acrotips, @pdfsage.

Optical character recognition (OCR). It may not be among the most well-known capabilities of Acrobat, but it’s certainly a powerful one. Need your PDF files to be searchable when they originated from paper or an already electronic “image” of a document? Check out the Acrobat product management team’s blog and this post from Aman Nagpal, Acrobat Product Manager, to learn how.

We here at Adobe are excited to announce the latest version of Acrobat Connect Pro to hit the market. Connect Pro 7.5, announced November 3rd, now allows organizations to improve their customer interactions through more collaborative meetings, training sessions, and Web seminars that increase real-time participation and bring people together when and where needed. Some enhancements include: the ability to integrate with any audio conferencing provider, increased webinar capacity that allows users to engage up to 80,000 participants in high-impact sessions that can incorporate rich media demonstrations, and more secure desktop sharing that offers increased control and enables regulation compliance.

To learn more about all that Acrobat Connect Pro has to offer, read the press release here. Your experience with online meetings and web seminars will never be the same again after you witness the new Acrobat Connect Pro 7.5!

We recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct surveys on collaboration among knowledge workers in the U.S. and Europe. The studies surveyed respondents about things like their requirements, habits, tools, concerns, and desired improvements when working with others to produce deliverables and achieve business goals. Some interesting insights resulted about collaborative work among people in both regions–and about the similarities and differences between the geographies (hint: we’re more similar than different).

A few tid-bits:

• While collaboration is pervasive across both regions, nearly 70 percent of knowledge workers believe improvements are needed.
• The top benefits sought? Improving the speed and efficiency of collaboration and reducing paperwork (each approximately two-thirds).

Want to learn more? Check out this section of our site for videos of a Forrester analyst discussing the findings and a link to the Forrester study. One of the folks on our Acrobat team, Lori DeFurio, also discussed the surveys as part of the latest segment of her show on Adobe TV.

Adobe Products Make History:

The Honorable John M. Facciola, Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, digitally signed a judicial order in late August, marking a first in U.S. history.

A consortium of companies and organizations, including several members of Adobe’s Security Partner Community, collaborated with the U.S. District Court to make this possible. The actual PDF order was signed using Adobe Acrobat 9.1. Check out this blog post to learn more about this exciting day!