The study called “Building The Future of Collaboration” was commissioned by Adobe, and the goal was to learn how knowledge workers across Europe and more recently in the United States collaborate in the workplace. You can read more about the study here, and there is commentary and analysis on Lori DeFurio’s Adobe TV show and blog, and on Joel Geraci’s excellent “IT Matters” blog.

According to the study, 77% of U.S. respondents and 76% of European respondents use email with attachments for collaboration. By contrast, only 2% of U.S.-based respondents and 1% of those in Europe use wikis for collaboration in the workplace (blogs and social networks were not much higher than that). As expected though, usage of these Web 2.0-based technologies was higher among younger workers, as they are clearly popular tools once everyone goes home (unless your boss doesn’t mind you checking your Facebook page once-in-a-while during the day).

So clearly knowledge workers today still prefer traditional collaborative tools. Why? Because they are human beings. And as humans, we generally tend to favor what we are familiar with over newer alternatives. At the same time, these knowledge workers acknowledge that there are limitations with these familiar collaborative tools: among U.S. respondents, the top challenges with these current methods are that not everyone has the same tools (59%); that some tools add complexity more than help (32%); and tools don’t work together well (24%).

So, something of a paradox here: technology is both helping and hindering collaboration in the workplace today. This is where I believe Adobe Acrobat can help. Although Acrobat 9 offers to streamline the collaborative process of getting feedback and comments from others, even when they are in different locations and time zones, it does so in ways that everyone is familiar with:

• the commenting tools look and feel like the paper ones we are all used to;
• rather than using our email inbox to track who has responded (something email was never intended to do) we can use the Acrobat 9 Tracker to keep an eye on document reviews, yet still use email from there for communication and reminders (something email was intended to do);
• according to the study, web conferencing and instant messaging are certainly more popular today: by leveraging Acrobat.com ConnectNow and Page View Sharing, Acrobat 9 can bring those methods of collaboration right into the familiar world of working with a PDF document;

What Adobe Acrobat 9 delivers on is being able to help everyone across the workplace be able to build a bridge from their current workflows to the needs of the future as technologies and their adoption change.

Click the linked image below to register for your own copy of the report. I hope it’s a powerful way to make your own case for using Acrobat 9 within and beyond your organization for collaboration (and many other) purposes.

* Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Adobe Systems Incorporated, September 2009

So how could you use them together? As expected, Microsoft Word can be used for seeing what’s changed as you author the document and go through versions, and Acrobat to gather feedback from one or more reviewers where they all the see the same thing, including other reviewers comments, without changing things in the document and without having to buy additional software. As you go through review cycles and various iterations of the document, you can incorporate comments and markup between the DOC/DOCX and PDF files, as well as have Acrobat apply the suggested and accepted changes for you back in to the source.

I have split these tips in to two entries: first up, going from Word to Acrobat…

[I am using Microsoft Word 2007 for these tips, but you can certainly use earlier supported versions of Word too. Sorry my Mac brothers and sisters who use Office 2008: this doesn't apply to you. You can skip over this blog entry, but there are lots of others you can read instead.]

Export Comments From Word to PDF

If you already have comments in the source Word document, you can include those in the resulting PDF file that you send out for review.

First go into your Acrobat PDFMaker Preferences, either from the Acrobat ribbon in Word 2007, or the Acrobat menu in an earlier version of Word. Click on the Word tab. Select “Convert displayed comments to notes in Adobe PDF” (it’s deselected by default).

Once you have checked that off, you can then be more selective about what is converted to sticky notes in the PDF file. For each reviewer you can:

• set whether to include their comments in the resulting PDF file
• decide whether the notes should be open or not in the PDF file
• choose the color the sticky notes will be (keep clicking the colored note to cycle through some standard colors)

Click OK to set the preferences (remember that PDFMaker preferences are sticky and will be used the next time you create a PDF file from Word this way). When you create the PDF file by clicking on the Create PDF button on the Word ribbon/toolbar (don’t create the PDF by printing to the Adobe PDF in this case), you will get a PDF file with the notes placed where you originally clicked to add a Word comment.

Acrobat will use the user name as configured in Word’s options as the Author for the PDF note. The note Subject will be empty as there is no equivalent in Word comments. And Accept and Reject are not flags in Word as they are in Acrobat – accepting a Word comment just keeps it in the document – so that is also ignored.

I have to thank the Acrobat engineering for also remembering to set the opacity of the notes in the resulting PDF to 30%, otherwise the notes would be covering all the text!

Note that if you send out the document for a Shared Review, these comments will have a new Author (whoever initiated the review) with “On behalf of…” added to the note pop-up text.

[It's the little details that Acrobat 9 has that I personally love and that make all the difference.]

Stay tuned for part 2 of this article where I walk you through exporting PDF comments from Acrobat back to Word, and have Acrobat apply edits for you.

“From my perspective, accessibility is about giving a crap…accessibility is NOT a checklist…accessibility is about usability.”

Thank you, Rob.

Are you an active SharePoint user who works with PDF files on SharePoint? If you are and you’re willing to have an hour phone call with Adobe, please post a comment on this blog with your business email address. (This email address will be hidden to everyone except Adobe.)

If you would like to participate, please make sure you post your comment on the Shredding the Document blog article. Otherwise, let me know how you are using SharePoint with Acrobat and Adobe Reader. Thank you in advance for your participation and feedback.

If you are going to be at MAX 2008 Europe or MAX 2009 Japan, this will be a preview for one of the sessions that will be repeated there, and hopefully encourage you to register for that and others too. For those of you that missed the event or these sessions last week in San Francisco and won’t be going to Milan or Tokyo, I’ll update this blog entry once the final recordings are posted later.

First up, the “Adobe Roadmap: Enterprise” session. This was a presentation on the ways current and future Adobe technologies can be used by everyone within the enterprise to create engaging experiences and get work done. Acrobat is presented as a solution for ad-hoc projects: one way is how Acrobat’s new Page View Sharing, based on the Adobe Labs Cocomo project, can be used to ensure that important information contained within documents is presented and understood correctly and quickly.

Later that day I joined Tad Staley and Phil Ice to present at the session entitled “Collaboration: Lessons From The Field”. Tad gave a nice overview of the collaboration services available with Acrobat.com.

Phil, Director of Course Design, Research and Development at American Public University System in West Virginia, presented some fascinating research findings on how students fare better when authoring and sharing documents in a collaborative way. Wait for the recording and posting for the slides to see his data. I found it interesting that those 34 (35?) and younger found it a natural process to start authoring collaboratively with others.

I had the pleasure to present how the University of Massachusetts Medical School use Photoshop, InDesign and Acrobat to teach students Neuroanatomy using “Atlases” digitally and collaboratively. These are the 2D scans of the human brain and spinal cord you may have seen elsewhere (like one of the medical shows on television that I have just been watching). Dr. Susan Gagliardi uses the highlighting tools in Acrobat to highlight areas of the scans in PDF versions that students should know about. Then, through enabling for commenting and analysis in Adobe Reader, students work collaboratively using Acrobat or Reader to highlight potential problem areas and demonstrate understanding. This electronic version of teaching and learning in a collaborative way mimics the way it was done before in the paper world, but is far easier to deal with and provides access to even more materials that were previously unavailable or unwieldy.

Finally, many thanks to those of you who came to my, and indeed all the Acrobat sessions, and stopped by the Acrobat User Community booth. As exhausting it can be to work and present at these conference, I had a ball!

I’ve already posted an article on using this capability. You can watch a short video on it here. But I have a question for those of you out there in the real world reading this that have Acrobat 9: How do you use the “Send and Collaborate Live” capability?

Here are some suggestions from me on how it can be used:

• Technical drawings and schematics, where someone needs to be guided to a specific point in the document, possible at a very high zoom level
• A sales representative walking a customer through contract or pricing documents over the phone
• Presenting a set of documents to a client or colleague, where the quality of the document needs to be preserved, e.g. high-resolution artwork
• A student walking her teacher or peers through a portfolio or project that she has been working on, explaining each part in detail

How about you? Any other great suggestions? Let us know.

Until you try this for yourself, the only way to really understand it is to see it in a real-world scenario.

Here’s a possible one…let’s say I’m an architect for a new office building. The project manager at my client’s location calls me, and leaves me a voicemail saying “Hey! We have a problem with the plans. Call me when you get this.” We’ve all received those messages before, right? So, you start leaving voicemails or sending emails to each other, never really understanding what the problem is or what to do about it. So frustrating. So unproductive. So 2007.

What I really want to do is to have my customer show me exactly where in the floor plan they have a problem, as if they were standing next to me moving my mouse, rubbing my back (this architect is very close to his clients). Only problem is they are on the other side of the country, and I have a meeting in 15 minutes with Mr. Trump about a major construction project. How can we control the view we have of the document right in Acrobat 9 or Reader 9 without having to go into an online or real meeting room, so I can find out where to make the change quickly and accurately?

This is where synchronized document views comes in. It literally allows you to share your view of a PDF document with up to 2 other friends at the same time. You are actually controlling the view of the PDF file in their installation of Acrobat 9 or Reader 9 (yes, Reader 9 users can participate too).

Here is one way you can get to the command…from the new Collaborate taskbar button in Acrobat 9…

Watch this video to see how it works in action…

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• It uses Acrobat.com In case you missed the news, Acrobat.com is a set of online hosted services from Adobe for sharing and collaboration. It’s currently free (and a public beta), but page view sharing uses Acrobat.com’s servers to handle the communication between clients. Acrobat.com uses HTTPS and SSL, and the review initiator can control who can download the PDF document. But it is the only server you can use today for synchronized document views.
• You need an Adobe ID to initiate. An Adobe ID is a way to authenticate yourself with Acrobat.com to enabled a document for Page View Sharing in Acrobat 9. If you don’t have one yet, you can get one right from within Acrobat 9 or Reader 9: it’s free, you sign up once, and the only information you need to provide includes your name, an email address, your password and the country you reside in. However, you do not need an Adobe ID to participate in page view sharing – you can just sign in as a guest.
• You need Acrobat 9 to initiate. But you can participate in page view sharing using only Reader 9. It’s not available in previous versions of either application. But you’ll upgrade, right?!
• It works with 3D content. It’s all about views. So if one of the participants changes the view of a 3D object in the PDF file, the others see the same 3D view. The implications for the manufacturing and AEC industry are huge for when it comes to rapid collaboration on documents.
• Only three participants at a time. Keep this in mind when distributing your collaboration-enabled documents. Just you and two friends. What you show your friends is up to you…
• It’s only for PDF documents in Acrobat 9 or Reader 9. This is not screen sharing. But if you need to share other application views, you can also the select the “Share My Screen…” from the new Collaborate Live panel, or from the Collaborate Taskbar button. This will open your free ConnectNow beta meeting room on Acrobat.com, and invite those two friends to join you in a desktop/application screen sharing session.

Which might bring up a good question…why not just use the screen sharing option that’s available? It’s a good discussion point, but one reason is that anyone who is participating in page view sharing can quickly and with minimal fuss share the view of the PDF file they have with others. It’s a conversation where everyone has a say and can contribute.

I think they call that collaboration, don’t they?!

A good question! It is an important one to consider if you are looking at standardizing on a way to conduct reviews on documents as quickly and as pain-free as possible.

If you are not familiar with Shared Reviews, then I am sorry to say this is not the blog entry to find out. But don’t stop reading! There are lots of good articles and tutorials on the subject, including a video tutorial yours truly created last year, posted on this page, and an article on this very subject here from 2006 with Randy Swineford, Acrobat Product Manager.

So why are Shared Reviews the way to go…?

1. You do not need Acrobat 8 to be a reviewer. That reason alone could justify the cost of Acrobat 8 Professional or Acrobat 3D Version 8, as those are the software applications you need to initiate a Shared Review AND enable the document for commenting and markup in the free Adobe Reader 8. Basically, it means virtually anyone can participate in a review cycle. Note, Acrobat 8 Standard can initiate a Shared Review, but it does not have the Reader-enablement goodness.
2. The PDF document can be distributed anyway you like. Via the web. To an email list. From a network folder. On your childs iPod. It does not matter. It is a totally flexible workflow, because all the information that Acrobat or Adobe Reader need to participate in a Shared Review is baked in to the PDF document itself (at 400 degrees fahrenheit for 35 minutes, in case you were wondering). Whether you open the PDF locally in Acrobat or Adobe Reader directly, or within Internet Explorer, Firefox Windows or Safari, you can go ahead and give your feedback.
3. You can get feedback from people almost instantaneously. Shared Reviews work by uploading comments to a Shared Location: a network share, a WebDAV folder (such as Apple’s .mac iDisk), or a Microsoft Sharepoint Workspace. Other reviewers can see what everyone else is saying by reading those comments from the shared location. And Acrobat and Reader 8′s Tracker And Shared Reviews Welcome screen also read those comments so that they can show who has responded and how many comments have been made.
4. You can work online or offline. Unlike browser-based reviews which required you to be online at all times to submit and view comments, Shared Reviews cache the comments you add to the document until you tell Acrobat or Reader to publish them, or they get published automatically after a certain period of time (that is set in the Preferences, by the way). If you are working offline, the comments are cached in the PDF until you are back online and ready to publish. If you are disconnected, Acrobat or Reader will know it, cache your comments, and try to reconnect to the shared location to check for and publish only the new or updated comments. And if after all that you still cannot connect to the shared location server, Acrobat or Reader 8 will ask you a) if you would like to email your comments back to the initiator who can upload them on your behalf and b) if you would like to see ways to improve your social and professional status so that you always have access to the shared location server (kidding on that last one).
5. Comments are tagged with metadata about you as a reviewer. Nothing too revealing (“this reviewer is currently participating in his pajamas” isn’t in there), but information such as name, email, and a time and date stamp are included. This has a couple of benefits: 1) everyone can see who said what and 2) other reviewers cannot change your comments. That last one is particularly important. If you want to comment on someone else’s comment, you can just reply in the pop-up for each comment or markup. It’s like social networking chat, but with a purpose.

If any one of the above reasons seem compelling to you, and if you have not tried a Shared Review in Acrobat 8, it may be time do so. It really is easy to start a Shared Review session, and even easier to participate. Grab a document you are working on right now, convert it to PDF, and send it for Shared Review using Acrobat 8 to someone you know will give you glowing-but-constructive feedback, no matter how bad your writing skills are. Have fun!