Behind the scenes at the Adobe Acrobat and PDF Conference 2006

The Adobe Acrobat and PDF Conference 2006 in Orlando on May 17 & 18 was a big success. PDF professionals, users and vendors from all over the world participated in the conference. Members of the Acrobat User Community attended a number of events at the conference, including the popular “Meet the Experts” sessions and an Adobe user-group breakfast. Kurt Foss, editor of AcrobatUsers.com, was at the conference and shares some observations and impressions from the two-day event.

Attendees, Acrobat experts mingle at Orlando conference
Attendees share insights and experiences they learned in some of the educational sessions at the conference.

Acrobat & PDF: Toward a richer and more collaborative future
In his keynote presentation, Rick Brown, Acrobat Group Product Manager for Adobe Systems, talks about product enhancements and some of the company’s recent acquisitions.

Adobe user-group breakfast features updates, testimonials
Adobe employees Pooja Goyal, Lori DeFurio and Lisa Forrester give updates on Acrobat and InDesign user communities. Chris Smith, chapter leader of the Boston Acrobat user group, talks about starting and sustaining a user group.

Expert session highlights
Brief overview of conference session highlights includes information on presentations by a variety of industry experts across three tracks.

Attendees, Acrobat experts mingle at Orlando conference

In addition to the Adobe Systems booth in the exhibit area of the Adobe Acrobat and PDF Conference 2006 in Orlando, a separate booth for the Acrobat User Community initiative provided information about and an opportunity to sign up for local chapters. It also featured a "Meet the Experts" area where conference attendees could meet and talk one-on-one with Lori DeFurio and Ali Hanyaloglu from Adobe, and a number of respected Acrobat gurus and conference presenters, including Ted Padova, Thom Parker, Leonard Rosenthol and Bob Connolly.

Attendees shared a number of insights and experiences, both from their on-the-job experiences and from things they'd learned in some of the educational sessions at the conference.

"In the forums I read, there has been quite a bit of confusion regarding AcroForms and LiveCycle Designer forms ever since Adobe started including Designer in the box with Acrobat," said Dimitri Munkirs of Windjack Solutions. "The confusion being that when a user selects 'Create a New Form' in Acrobat, they are taken into Designer, so they think they are in an interchangeable situation and believe that forms created in Designer are equivalent to forms created in Acrobat. Of course, the reality is that some features in each product do not work or are not available in the other. I talked with several attendees for whom a lightbulb popped off after attending the session 'Adobe PDF Forms: Adobe Acrobat and Adobe LiveCycle Designer: Choosing the right tool.' This was a brilliant topic to have at the conference and I believe it cleared up this confusion for many people."

"I've been involved with Acrobat for 10 years now, and I still learned some new tricks and techniques at the conference,' said Hanyaloglu, "in part because of the excellent questions and problems posed to me by attendees at the 'Meet the Experts' booth. Hanyaloglu led sessions on "Version Cue and PDF Document Reviews" and "Review and Markup workflow with Adobe Acrobat."

"Unlike many other conferences where attendees feel they have to be there, everybody who attended my sessions WANTED to be there and learn something new," said Hanyaloglu. "That makes for a far more productive, enjoyable and memorable event. Comment and review workflow with Acrobat and Version Cue CS2 is arguably one of the least-known applications for PDF, even for those who have the Creative Suite installed on their computers. I'm happy that I was able to talk about using the Creative Suite for this workflow, as many attendees came up to me afterwards and said they would start using it."

"The conference provided us a great opportunity to meet with a number of passionate Acrobat users and customers from different parts of the world," said Pooja Goyal of Adobe. "It was exciting to hear how these customers are using and deploying Acrobat in new and interesting ways. One of the clear messages we heard from the attendees was that AcrobatUsers.com and the Acrobat user groups have provided them a great platform to engage with other Acrobat users around the globe."

Acrobat & PDF: Toward a richer and more collaborative future

Rick Brown, Acrobat Group Product Manager for Adobe Systems, offered Adobe Acrobat and PDF Conference 2006 attendees an assessment of product enhancements and capabilities resulting from some of the company's recent acquisitions. In his keynote presentation in Orlando, Brown said the goal isn't to merely add gratuitous bells and whistles to documents, but to enhance business communication.

"It's not about trying to make things more flashy and entertaining," Brown said,  "it's about making them engaging, easier for people to access, use and re-use information. It's all about creating engaging experiences."

Rick Brown's presentation [PDF: 938 KB]  
Adobe Engagement Platform [PDF: 77 KB]  

One example of a company that has extended PDF for an industry-specific application is TerraGo. Brown gave a brief demonstration of the company's GeoPDF application for the geographic information system (GIS) industry that utilizes PDF layers for high-quality, interactive maps. The files are also enabled for adding comments using the free Adobe Reader. TerraGo's free plug-in adds a toolbar for enhanced interaction. An end user can also use a connected global-positioning system (GPS) receiver with the TerraGo-created PDF file to see points captured on the map, and the data can be captured in the PDF and sent back to the source GIS.

In his overview of the Adobe Engagement Platform (AEP) — a framework for referencing the company's growing range of products and combined capabilities — Brown explained that future developments are aimed at helping users create richer, collaborative digital experiences across applications, operating systems and devices. A key to the trend of taking applications outside the browser is Apollo, combining Adobe's ubiquitous Reader, PDF and Flash, with HTML to create more interactive, full-featured desktop applications. Brown said further details will become available on the Adobe Labs website later this year.

Adobe user-group breakfast features updates, testimonials

During the recent Acrobat & PDF 2006 conference, Adobe hosted the first combined gathering of user-group chapter members, sponsoring a breakfast session for registered members of the respective user communities for Acrobat and InDesign.

Pooja Goyal and Lori DeFurio provided brief overviews of the Acrobat User Community initiative, which includes AcrobatUsers.com, and Lisa Forrester offered a similar summary of the previously launched InDesign User Community and related website. Chris Smith, host of the Orlando conference and also one of the leaders of the Acrobat user group in Boston, talked about the experience and benefits of getting a chapter up and running.

Goyal said that since launching AcrobatUsers.com in February 2006, the site now has more than 3,000 registered users and 16 local chapter sites on the map — including several outside the United States. She said that Adobe has deliberately slowed the pace of growth to make sure that existing groups are doing well, meeting regularly and have all the support and resources they need to succeed. At the same time, Goyal said that based on some discussions with conference attendees, there could be several new chapter launches in the not-too-distant future. She encouraged people who have not yet completed the free site registration to "sign up and play a role in the formative stage of this community because your feedback is very important to us."

In addition to the two currently featured Technology Corner areas on the site — hosted respectively by Lori DeFurio and Thom Parker — Goyal said that Dov Isaacs of Adobe Systems will soon be hosting a similar area focused on printing, with another dedicated to Acrobat 3D to follow. Guidelines for launching a new chapter are explained in the User Group Starter Kit file.

Smith worked with Ali Hanyaloglu of Adobe to launch the Acrobat chapter in Boston, and told the breakfast crowd that it "brought together a diverse group of people from a broad array of different industries," including education, architecture users, engineering, financial services, and print, publishing and graphics.

"The real interesting thing is that Adobe is very supportive at a corporate level in giving us the infrastructure and support we need," he said. "All we really have are the ideas, which are coming from our individual members in the community."

Smith suggested that the formation of local user-group chapters is a way to extend and enhance the kind of learning going on at the conference. "When you leave here, you don't have to end your dialogue with each other," Smith said. "It's something you can take back and continue face-to-face in your local community." Active chapters provide an opportunity for users to share problems and solutions, to learn from each other and to take advantage of resources in the area, he said.

Expert session highlights 

The recent Acrobat and PDF 2006 conference featured topical sessions across three tracks, led by a variety of industry experts. A few highlights:

• Dov Isaacs of Adobe Systems offered an update of his always popular, two-part "Reliable Print Production with Acrobat & PDF" sessions that addresses many challenges and issues related to achieving consistent, high-quality results using the latest authoring and layout applications. Isaacs stressed the importance of establishing a dependable PDF print-publishing workflow for producing PDFs that "accurately reflect the original text and graphical content, and can consistently, cost-effectively and reliably be viewed, printed or otherwise rendered anywhere and everywhere." Isaac's high-quality presentation is available for download.
  What is a PDF Publishing Workflow? [PDF: 115 MB]  
  
  
• The ever-versatile Ted Padova drew a crowd to all three of his sessions: "Adobe Acrobat: Essential features, tips, and tools," "PDF Forms: Choosing the right tools" and "Advanced Acrobat tips and techniques."
  
  
• Likewise, Leonard Rosenthol of PDF Sages handled three diverse sessions: "What’s inside a PDF?," "PDF/A: Archiving with PDF," and "Color Management and PDF."
  
  
• Thom Parker of Windjack Solutions, who also hosts the JavaScript Corner on AcrobatUsers.com, covered "Acrobat JavaScript tools and techniques," and "Building dynamic, database driven PDF forms."
  
  
• Bob Connolly of pdfPictures.com showed that there's more to PDF than static, suited-for-printing documents by showcasing the format's rich potential in his "Enhancing PDF with multimedia" session