October 2009 Archives

Forrester Consulting, on behalf of Adobe, conducted independent, online surveys of 700 U.S.-based respondents and 3,000 European-based participants to understand more about collaborative work within their respective geographies. The studies, completed in September 2009 and December 2008, respectively, involved knowledge workers with full-time employment who have office productivity software tools, an Internet-connected computer and work in organizations of various sizes.

The surveys found that while collaboration is pervasive across both regions, nearly 70 percent of knowledge workers believe improvements are needed, with top benefits sought including the speed and efficiency of collaboration and an associated reduction of paperwork (each approximately two-thirds). On this and many key findings, workers in the United States and Europe found strong common ground.

Sooooo, I've been saying this in security eSeminars and meetings for ages now.... Watermarks are a really useful tool in helping to keep your documents and other contenet secure.

Since most document loss is accidental... (I send you a document and you think the content is so great you share it with some who actually shouldn't really have access) ... If you watermark documents with the appropriate phrase, they're less likely to be accidentaly shared. It's easy to imagine how a large "Company Confidential" watermark might stop someone from inadvertently sharing a document with partners or customers.

The best bit? It's really easy to do, take a look here.....

....see I told you!

What a busy weekend it was... first the bad...

Sport!
Gloucester somehow are conspiring to become the most awful team in the Guinnes Premiership losing quite pathetically to a resurgent Wasps. Two tries from Mark Van Gisbergen and one each from Dominic Waldouck and Serge Betsen helped Wasps seal a well deserved bonus-point win at Kingsholm.

So Saturday was poor, then on Sunday Manchester United were beaten 0-2 at Anfield by Liverpool who ended their worst sequence of results since 1987. It has to be said, we were.... deservedly beaten at Anfield, crikey that was hard to say.

....and now the good

Sport!
Watford beat Sheffield Midweek 4-1 on Friday night, a match we all thoroughly enjoyed in the Rookery.

Saturday's final NCT class has left me feeling like I might not be completely all at sea when our first born son comes along... By the way, this is what he's currently looking like...

The Nursery is coming along a treat too, 3 coats of paint in, 2 to go!

Today I'll be on a training course to improve my communcation and presentation skills, I'm hoping that future Blog posts will make more sense. I'm also hoping that it will help me create some new innovative presentations on aspects of Acrobat. You know how it is, you can often describe a subtle nuance of your work in coversation but are unable to put it down in a more formal way, let's hope todays training might help that.

TTFN
Steve

LONDON, Oct. 5 (UPI) -- A British government document advising officials on how to keep documents from leaking to the Internet has been published -- on the Internet.

The 2,400 page Defense Manual of Security, authored by the Ministry of Defense to help high-ranking military and defense officials keep documents safe from leaks, was published on Wikileaks, a Web site designed for anonymous leaks of documents from governments and other organizations, The Daily Telegraph reported Monday.

"Leaks usually take the form of reports in the public media which appear to involve the unauthorized disclosure of official information (whether protectively marked or not) that causes political harm or embarrassment to either the U.K. Government or the Department concerned," the document reads in its "Leaks of Official Information" section.

"The threat (of leakage) is less likely to arise from positive acts of counter-espionage, than from leakage of information through disaffected members of staff, or as a result of the attentions of an investigative journalist, or simply by accident or carelessness," it reads.

Comment from Steve:

So to me, this is another great example of putting security inside your document, just like we can do with Acrobat and PDF!

Adobe Acrobat 9.2 Pro and Standard Update - Multiple Languages

The Adobe® Acrobat® 9.2 Pro and Standard update addresses a number of customer workflow issues and critical security vulnerabilities while providing more overall stability.

For more information regarding issues addressed in this release, see the Release Notes.

The update can be applied to version 9.1.3 of Adobe Acrobat Pro and Standard.

This is a multilingual update for Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, Swedish, Bulgarian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4561

Adobe Acrobat 9.2 Pro Extended Update - Multiple Languages

The Adobe® Acrobat® 9.2 Pro Extended update addresses critical security vulnerabilities while providing more overall stability.

For more information regarding issues addressed in this release, see the Release Notes.

The update can be applied to version 9.1.3 of Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended.

This is a multilingual update for Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish.

.....and here's the link for the download
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4559

My colleague Marcus has been at IFRA recently and has been updating us via his excellent blog. Definitely worth a read if you have a creative side and/or like Lego.

He did point out the ad campaign that our friends in Russia had run for Acrobat 9 Pro earlier this year. In the best traditions of Russian animation, that ads are whimsical, funny, cute have excellent timing but most of all, I'm not quite sure how they relate to Acrobat!

"The Acrobat Brothers".... you can see them for yourself here

So, I'm 2 days late (busy etc.) but on Oct 13th a Security Bulletin has been posted in regards to the second quarterly security update for Adobe Reader and Acrobat. The update addresses critical security issues in the products; Adobe recommends that users apply the update for their product installations. Please note that with support for Adobe Reader 7.X and Acrobat 7.X ending in December 2009, this is the last scheduled update planned for Adobe Reader 7.X and Acrobat 7.X.

The Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.2 and 8.1.7 updates will include a new update and deployment tool, initially shipping in a passive, beta state, which will be functional for Acrobat and Adobe Reader customers in the near future, as well as two new changes in security user interface and control.

More information on this is available here.

Posted from the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) site, late last week.....

Adobe is aware of reports of a critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1.3 and earlier (CVE-2009-3459) on Windows, Macintosh and UNIX. There are reports that this issue is being exploited in the wild in limited targeted attacks; the exploit targets Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1.3 on Windows.

Adobe plans to resolve this issue as part of the upcoming Adobe Reader and Acrobat quarterly security update, scheduled for release on October 13. Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1.3 customers with DEP enabled on Windows Vista will be protected from this exploit. Disabling JavaScript also mitigates against this specific exploit, although a variant that does not rely on JavaScript could be possible. In the meantime, Adobe is also in contact with Antivirus and Security vendors regarding the issue and recommends users keep their anti-virus definitions up to date.

We wish to thank Chia-Ching Fang and the Information and Communication Security Technology Center for their help with reporting and investigating this issue (CVE-2009-3459).

We will continue to provide updates on this issue via the Security Advisory section of the Adobe web site, as well as the Adobe PSIRT blog.

Check out the full Blog here

Adobe MAX has been awesome as always, here are a couple of links to some Air action....

"Preview - Desktop Integration in Adobe AIR 2"
Adobe AIR Senior Engineering Manager Arno Gourdol highlights the functionality of storage volume mount notifications and document launching in the next version of Adobe AIR 2.
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adc-presents/preview-desktop-integration-in-adobe-air-2/

"Preview - Command Line Integration in Adobe AIR 2"
Senior Computer Scientist Brent Rosenquist highlights CLI in the next version of Adobe AIR 2. Learn to create native process objects and handle the standard output data they produce.
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adc-presents/preview-command-line-integration-in-adobe-air-2/

I enjoyed a great Acrobat session yesterday with an existing customer. We covered most aspects of the use of Acrobat, but one area that hit a load of peoples hotbuttons was commenting and specifically merging from multiple users.

Well, there's a great video here

I seem to be working with cloud computing again. There's been a bit of a pause but I've also noticed that cloud computing has hit the peak of the Gartner hype curve.... see attached...

But, although cloud computing might be about to enter thr "trough of disillusionment", as the next image shows....

It does look like Cloud Computing could be here to stay as a major impacting technology. In all the comparisons I've seen recently, www.acrobat.com shows up pretty well so I'll let you know more on where it's going as soon as I'm able to....

In the meantime, checkout www.acrobat.com because it's a great set of online services -- file sharing and storage, a PDF converter, an online word processor, and web conferencing -- you can use to create and share documents, communicate in real time, and simplify working with others.

Thanks
Steve

Hiya,

I'm still running loads and loads of webinars for customers and new prospects. Once of the things that is still grabbing attention with the people I meet is the ability to create and share an ePortfolio.

the Adobe Acrobat User Community have ePortfolios as their topic of the month and I heartily (never thought I'd use that word in a blog) reccomend a visit to the site...

http://www.acrobatusers.com/

It's a great site that I try to view every few days. It has great content as well as some of the best Acrobatr minds out there.

In fact, later in October, the 21st to be precise, Lori DeFurio will be running an eSeminar to share with you how easy it is to organize content from a variety of sources--including documents, email, images, spreadsheets, and web pages--in a single searchable PDF Portfolio, compressed for easy distribution.

She will show you how to use professional designed templates that can be branded with your company logo and colors. Quickly integrate content, define navigation and add polish to communicate clearly and effectively. Apply permissions and passwords to help protect sensitive information. Share information with anyone using free Adobe Reader software.

here's the topic link for you... http://www.acrobatusers.com/monthly_topic/2009/10

Enjoy!