I’m so excited that Acrobat.com has moved from ‘beta’ to ‘shipping’ today. In addition to the free services which have been available for the past year, there are premium services increasing meeting and file size, and support.
Please visit http://blogs.adobe.com/acom/2009/06/hello_business_world_welcome_t.html for a full description of what’s new, what’s improved, and pre-release tools for business productivity.
Yes, I’ve been “dark” for a few weeks. I’ve been preparing for today! I truly believe that this release of Acrobat (and Adobe Reader) will be a “game changing” event — just like desktop publishing in the 1980′s and web publishing in the 1990′s.
The marriage of Flash and PDF (just like the marriage of Macromedia and Adobe) creates a union stronger than the separate parts. That’s right – the Adobe Flash runtime (based on version 9) is baked right into Acrobat and Reader. That means that any Flash content you’ve added to a PDF document on your computer – either Flash Video (FLV) or a Flash animation or application (SWF) – will just work on anyone else’s computer – as long as they’re using Acrobat or Adobe Reader 9.
The Acrobat Family.
We have three products in the family now — Acrobat 9 Standard, Acrobat 9 Pro, and Acrobat 9 Pro Extended. Each product fulfills a certain market segment – for example, Acrobat 9 Standard is great for creating and distributing PDF documents and forms! That’s right – Acrobat 9 Standard has the ability to create fillable PDF forms, distribute these forms, and collect the information in a simple and streamlined fashion. I’ve included a quick demonstration of this process.
Acrobat 9 Pro (formerly Acrobat Professional) continues to be our workhorse product for people who need to work with PDF documents – either to work more closely with others, like using the commenting tools and workflows to collect feedback, to ensuring your documents are sanitized, to working with PDF documents for print production. If you want to learn more about improvements and updates to collaboration, take a look at The Same Page – a blog focused on Acrobat and Collaboration.
And the newest addition – Acrobat 9 Pro Extended – is the ultimate toolset for working with PDF documents. Acrobat 9 Pro Extended has all the capabilities of Acrobat 3D version 8, but also so much more… There’s a Video-to-Flash transcoder which allows drag-and-drop of any type of multimedia format onto Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, and it’s converted to Flash video automatically. And, Adobe Presenter – a powerful add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint, is included! This technology is so cool. It allows you to add audio, video, and SWF in a PowerPoint presentation and then save it to PDF for viewing offline. If you want a deeper look at the differences between the products check out the feature matrix.
Oh.. and one more thing… Acrobat 9 is now available in 28 languages! To see the full list you can refer to the Language Support page.
I expect to share more with you this week, and please feel free to send me comments so that I can help you understand the Acrobat 9 family.
If you want more information…
Take a look at the blogs and articles on AcrobatUsers.com. These contributors have been in the Acrobat pre-release program and can share their first-hand experience with the product family.
Also.. feel free to sign up to be notified when the free Acrobat 9 trial download will be available.
Today marks the one year anniversary for AcrobatUsers.com. If you haven’t had the chance to visit yet – please stop by. If you’ve been following us this year – we appreciate the support. We have over 10, 000 registered members, 18 chapters, and lots of new functionality introduced in recent months. I appreciate the tireless efforts of our bloggers and “Ask the Expert” contributors.
My personal goal for 2007 is to have a portal for Acrobat Connect users and content localized for non-English speaking members.
Happy Birthday AcrobatUsers.com
(and Happy Valentine’s Day to each of you)
I’m so excited about our announcement earlier today. In case you didn’t see the Press Release, Adobe has offered up the PDF specification (version 1.7) to the International Standards Organization (ISO). AIIM will be the facilitator.
As a long time Acrobat and PDF user and evangelist, this news and decision by our executive team will ensure a long-lasting PDF community within government, education, and business organizations world-wide. It is clearly the next logical step for PDF as a standard. ISO has already ratified PDF/X and PDF/A, with PDF/E just around the corner.
Leonard Rosenthol, Technical Standards Evangelist at Adobe has prepared an excellent outline of the history of PDF as an open technology on his blog
We have an FAQ posted, but please feel free to comment here if you have questions about the announcement.
If you want to chat in person, I’m aware of the following events this week:
- Joel Geraci, who has taken over for me as Acrobat/PDF Technical Evangelist, is at the Lyra Symposium.
- Rick Borstein, the voice behind the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog , is at LegalTech.
- I’ll be at Smart Geometry Workshop & Conference in NYC.
I’m excited to let you know that Adobe has a multi-city (12) tour starting next week dedicated to educating attendees on Acrobat Connect Professional. The sessions are 9:00 – 12:00 (registration begins at 8:30 am).
I’ve been using Acrobat Connect Professional (formerly known as Macromedia Breeze) since the companies came together and I’ve found that as a world traveler, I love the fact that I can hold a meeting, show a demo, or just share my desktop from anywhere to anyone.
I encourage you to attend one of these events if you can – and if not, there are online seminars as an alternative.
And if you do attend – I would love to hear how your experience was. Did you learn something new? Do you think you’ll use the technology?
I’m very excited to announce the start of a Breeze Best Practices series. This eSeminar series, which will being on Tuesday, May 23rd, is designed to help Breeze users and IT administrators get up to speed quickly on a variety of topics.
First up – Best Practices for Using Curriculums in Breeze Training, which will be delivered by Randah McKinnie.
Please see http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=451256&loc=en_us for complete details and to sign up for the sessions.
And, of course, if you miss one, they will be archived as OnDemand seminars.
