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Exciting news arrived at Acrobat HQ in the last day or so: Acrobat 9 was just recently awarded "Best Collaboration Software" by Small Business Computing. What is really great about this is that it was chosen by the publication's readers.

The article announcing the winners is here. To quote Small Business Computing:

Let's face it: The days when collaboration meant attaching and e-mailing files that you could then discuss over the phone are over. These days collaboration means one document reviewed in real-time by multiple workers who share a vested interest.

If Adobe Acrobat doesn't spring to your mind when someone says "collaboration," you aren't among the 28 percent of readers who voted it Best Collaboration product. Adobe Acrobat 9 is designed to let businesses use commenting tools to share feedback and collaborate live within a PDF document by working with Acrobat.com, a suite of hosted services. Also, because Adobe Reader is free, you can share feedback and responses with just about anyone.

Taking runners-up honors, with 22 percent of the vote each, are Google Apps Team Edition and Zimbra Collaboration Suite 5.0 (the company's first product release after it was acquired by Yahoo).

Thanks to Small Business Computing and their readers. We are truly honored.

Posted by Ali Hanyaloglu at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“The German team used to travel to Ireland to work through their edits with the designers.” Emphatically believing in and being passionate about your work are things I agree with, but even that quote struck me as a work process that could be addressed.

And so did Tourism Ireland, who turned to PDF and Acrobat as a way to reduce the time and cost associated with collecting comments and edits on documents in different languages, with different needs, from staff members all over the globe. Although Tourism Ireland may not be the largest tourism organization in the world, the challenges they faced in ensuring high-quality information was timely and accurate are faced by many organizations and individuals today.

My favorite comment from Patrick Lennon, print and publishing officer at Tourism Ireland: "It is important for each publication to be produced in a format that is suited to the country and to the people who will be reading it. For example, publications distributed in Germany often have more text because the consumer requires more detail.” For my German friends that I work with and read this, it is all about the details, right?!

You can read more right here. And if you then feel like a trip to that beautiful Emerald Isle yourself, you can learn more here, and then just GO! Trust me, you will love it.

I was also happy to see that the article mentioned that Tourism Ireland turned to Ian Campbell, of ICCS, for their Acrobat training needs. Nice plug you got there, Ian, and rightly so! Great work.

Posted by Ali Hanyaloglu at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Does anyone here need to save some cash to pay off that moped you decided to buy in the middle of winter? How about a few extra hours a week to improve your Guitar Hero® record? Well these Adobe customers were not concerned about two-wheeled open-air transportation or addictive games (maybe they were), but they did save time and money when it came to document reviews and approvals using Acrobat 9.

Here is a summary of the benefits the customer realized. Click the logos to read more on Adobe's website...

3DE

• Reduced design review cycles by 50% or more
• Improved quality of designs by 200%
• Eliminated the need to purchase costly CAD and translation software
• Reduced CAD files sizes by as much as 90%

Bernstein-Rein

• Reduced time to market for ads by 50% or more


• Eliminated duplicate data entry


• Supported ad hoc workflows, a must in the hectic ad agency environment


• Freed staff time for more strategic services

TVS Motor Company

• Faster access to mission-critical engineering diagrams, drawings, and 3D illustrations


• Improved collaboration among cross-functional teams and external suppliers


• Enhanced workflow management and business productivity


• Achieved significant savings in printing and shipping costs

Good, Fulton & Farrell

• "We can collect input from reviewers in hours, not days."


• “By moving from paper-based document review to delivering materials in Adobe PDF, we can reduce printing and handling costs for a project from $45,000 to $5,000.”

Those are just a few of the many more that are out there and that I will blog about soon. If you have a story you would like to share, either drop a comment or join the Adobe Customer Success Program. And feel free to tell me how that cool new moped is working out for you...

Posted by Ali Hanyaloglu at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was recently asked by someone "How do I change the settings for an existing Shared Review location? The server folder I use for collecting comments has changed." This is fairly straightforward to do...

You will need to create a new Server Location. But Acrobat 9 will not let you create one with the same name as one that already exists when you go through the "Send for Review" steps. Therefore, you will need to delete the old Location first. To do that, we need to take a trip down to Preferences. So open those up using Edit > Preferences...(Windows) or Acrobat > Preferences...(Mac), and select the "Tracker" preferences from the list on the right.

There you will see the "Custom Server Locations" listed in a drop-down which are the names you were asked to use when you first created a Location for a Shared Review. Select the one you want to remove, then press the "Remove Server Profile" button.

You can now return to the "Send for Review" wizard and recreate the profile for your Shared Review location.

Now if you would like to change the location of your home to a place in your favorite spot in the world, you are on your own....

Posted by Ali Hanyaloglu at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The Adobe Reader team are conducting a short survey of Adobe Reader users to understand how you, um, use the software, and find out what you would like it to be in the future.

You can get to the survey from their blog.

Posted by Ali Hanyaloglu at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh yes. Happy New Year everyone! All of us in Adobe Land are back from a break, ready and energized to face whatever 2009 may bring. I hope you all have a good year.

This past weekend, the New York Times published an article on T.V. Raman, a true pioneer and leader on accessible technology.

As the article points out, T.V. Raman had worked previously at Adobe Systems on accessibility initiatives, including PDF and Acrobat. Today, both technologies are accessible to those with visual and motion disabilities. I am a big advocate of ensuring content is universally accessible (my business card is in Braille too). With a small amount of effort and foresight, it is possible to ensure documents you create and share are accessible without having to recreate everything. There are even benefits to those who are able to see the monitor, or use a keyboard and mouse, such as reflow and reusing content in other editable formats.

If you would like to learn more, see the tutorials and articles on www.adobe.com/accessibility.

Posted by Ali Hanyaloglu at 3:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)