Introduction and Welcome to AcrobatUsers.com

by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

Welcome to AcrobatUsers.com, a new Adobe-supported, user-driven website that we hope will become a frequent oasis for the global community of Adobe Acrobat enthusiasts.

If you're visiting this virtual Acrobat and PDF abode during its "Open House" period in February 2006, you'll notice that the paint is still wet, and there's a lot of open space. Please feel free to wander in and look around — after all, this is intended to be *your* home as much as ours.

As you check out the various areas, please keep in mind that we'll be looking for your input — e-mail us at team@acrobatusers.com — on how best to make this place comfortable and functional — a virtual destination you'll enjoy returning to and from which you'll leave feeling you have advanced your Acrobat knowledge and skills.

First, a little about the "we" behind the curtain. I'm delighted to have this opportunity to serve as the editor for AcrobatUsers.com. As some of you may know, I have been active on several fronts for more than a decade in helping to nurture the growth of an unofficial community focused on the use of Acrobat and PDF. I previously served as editor of two well-known sites, PDFzone.com and PlanetPDF.com, have managed e-mail discussion lists and online discussion forums for both sites, and have attended and reported on many of the industry conferences that cater to these technologies. Through this range of experiences, I have had the chance to meet a broad cross-section of users and to learn and write about many of the interesting — and sometimes groundbreaking — things many of you have accomplished with the Acrobat family of products.

During the same period, I have obviously had considerable contact with – and, in numerous cases, a chance to get to know -- a range of Adobe staff, particularly those who make up the so-called "Acrobat Team." Despite being an enthusiastic supporter of this technology from its earliest days, I have at various points been publicly critical of certain Adobe decisions or actions that I felt did not have the best interests of Acrobat users at heart. Yet I can honestly say that I always found the Adobe staff with whom I interacted to be first-class people, for whom I developed much respect.

Working on this project for the past two months, I have had even closer interaction with a number of Adobe's key Acrobat staff who have been among the driving forces in launching this Acrobat-community building effort. To get a more detailed explanation of Adobe's interest in helping to deepen the connection between the company and its Acrobat customers, I invite you to read my recent interview with Ricky Liversidge, director of Acrobat and Breeze product marketing.

I'd also like to introduce you to a couple other Acrobat Team members — Pooja Goyal and Lori DeFurio — who have together done much of the heavy lifting to turn the concept of the Acrobat User Community Initiative into reality, both with the founding of a number of local user-group chapters and the planning for and initial development of this website. Following Adobe's recent acquisition of Macromedia, both Pooja and Lori now are part of the Knowledge Worker Business Unit, including both the Acrobat and Breeze product families.

During one of the recent roadshows where product managers and other staff mingle with customers and users from around the country, Pooja picked up on a recurring theme — and a dilemma of sorts. It became clear that "most users realized that Acrobat is a powerful tool for collaboration, securing documents, combining documents," she says. "However, they also did not use Acrobat to its full potential."

When the various conversations evolved to whether a particular work group or company might be looking to deploy Acrobat more broadly to take greater advantage of Acrobat's diverse functionality, she says the responses from users with different job functions were similar. Whether she was talking to "IT managers or lawyers or architects" — representing just a few of the professions in which Adobe PDF plays an increasingly vital role — one of the first questions was:

“Has anybody else done it?”

Pooja says customers always wanted to know how others in their respective industries were utilizing Acrobat and PDF. In other words, they weren't as interested in hearing Adobe staff sing the praises of the technology as in learning about the real-world experiences — good and bad — of their PDF-savvy colleagues and competitors.

From those insights grew the plans at Adobe to facilitate greater information sharing among customers, and between dedicated users and Adobe staff.

"With those kinds of questions," she says, "getting more directly involved with the existing community seemed the best answer, so they could hear it from other customers and users who have successfully deployed it or used it in their workflow. An active Acrobat community can enable sharing of creative ideas and knowledge and enable everyone from beginners to power users to get more out of the product."

Lori probably needs less of an introduction to anyone who has been active in the Acrobat and PDF ecosystem for a while. With nine years at Adobe and the past five spent working closely with third-party developers, speaking at numerous industry events, and being one of the company's most visible and knowledgeable staffers in PDF-oriented forums and discussion lists, Lori's addition signals that Adobe is committed to and serious about this endeavor. She's also been actively involved in the Washington, D.C.-area Acrobat user group that began in 2002, which will serve as the model for new chapters in other cities and countries, some of which are already under way. Visit Lori's Corner, where she will regularly post Acrobat tips, answer reader-submitted questions and share special insights.

In what will be an ongoing series highlighting community members and other Adobe staff involved in hosting and presenting at various chapter meetings, we have posted mini-profiles of Adobe's Mark Smalley, who helped launch the Washington, D.C.-area group three years ago, and Stephen Levenson, a member of that chapter who has played a significant role in the adoption of Acrobat and PDF by the legal community and throughout the federal court system. Levenson also serves as chairman of the PDF/A committee that developed an international specification for using a subset of PDF as a standard for document archiving.

Despite Adobe's key role in helping to build the framework for a formalized Acrobat community, however, all staff members with whom I have worked and talked about the project's mission have emphasized that expansion and future direction will be determined by community members, not by the company. Pooja and Lori, for example, pulled together an advisory group of Acrobat customers and users late last year to help define and shape the venture.

Now that we have opened the doors, please start exploring AcrobatUsers.com. Then tell us how we can make it into an important educational resource -- what are the Acrobat-oriented issues, challenges and additional skills you need or want help understanding and learning? And since this site also is based on the principle of user-to-user support, we're very interested in tapping into the broad and deep expertise that exists throughout the Acrobat user community. We want to showcase your successes and accomplishments so others can benefit from your experiences. Share the wealth!

In the near future we will be adding a number of new features to the site to facilitate interactive dialogue, including blogs. And we will be developing and soliciting a lot more original content -- tips, tutorials, case studies, news and feature articles, interviews, etc., all aimed at helping users get more out of Acrobat and PDF.

But enough about us. This site now exists for — and because of — you.

"Our customers asked us to do this," Lori says, "and we have responded."

"Now we would love to hear from you," Pooja adds, "about what is working, what is not working and what needs to change. This website will evolve based on where the users and the community want to take it."

Talk to us at team@acrobatusers.com!