Adobe interview: Kevin Lynch, VP/Product Marketing, Knowledge Worker Business Unit (KWBU)

'Go-to guy for Acrobat in Education'

As vice president of product marketing for the Knowledge Worker Business Unit at Adobe Systems, Kevin Lynch has revenue and strategy responsibility for Adobe Acrobat, the Flash Media Server and the newly rebranded Acrobat Connect product (formerly Breeze). He talked recently with AcrobatUsers.com about Acrobat 8 and Acrobat Connect, which represent the first integration of Macromedia and Adobe technologies, and about several other related topics.

Lynch: "I think it's going really well. Our shared passion about revolutionizing the way people engage with ideas and information is just a great rallying cry for us as a company. It's something both companies did and both want to do together as one company. It's really exciting to see the teams come together and think about the future, how they combine and leverage what they know and what they love. Even within our own business unit, it's amazing to see the Acrobat document-centric people propose ideas for the real-time world and how their use cases could be better handled in real time-and vice versa. So far, I don't think things could be going better. It's a great fit."

Foss: Coming from Macromedia and taking over the marketing of an Adobe product (Acrobat) that's been a significant revenue generator for several versions and years, did it take you a while to get comfortable with the product and the responsibility for its ongoing development?

Lynch: "It's definitely been exciting. One of my visions at Macromedia has always been about the combination of asynchronous and synchronous communication. At Macromedia, with Breeze we were heavily involved with the synchronous real time-including the use of persistent meeting rooms. We also realized people want to get information that isn't always in real time. The document format from Acrobat is a perfect fit for that vision. Now we really have documents and people.

I'll confess that all of the details and intricacies of Acrobat have taken a while to get up to speed with. There's so much you can do with it. I have the impression that you can't ever quite catch up to what the engineers are continually adding. It's pretty amazing."

Foss: In terms of the continued evolution of the Acrobat product line, why did it seem to make sense to rebrand Breeze as Acrobat Connect (AC)?

Lynch: "Our view of one of the big problems that knowledge workers have is to be able to communicate and collaborate confidently across all boundaries-different versions of operating systems, different devices and so on. With PDF, you have the ability to collaborate through comments and markups, but the reality is that a lot of times you run into situations where you want to escalate into a real-time conversation to resolve something. That's where Breeze comes in-to offer that real-time collaboration capability, so that you can instantly jump into a real-time web conferencing session and resolve those issues.

Just as PDF is ubiquitous, Acrobat Connect is now available instantly everywhere because it's built on the Flash player. Like Adobe Reader, almost everyone has the Flash player. You don't have to worry about platform or version-you can instantly communicate with people. Breeze was probably one of the best-kept secrets we had at Macromedia, a fantastic product. By bringing it into the Acrobat family, people will better understand what a great solution it is."

Foss: What were some of the challenges in assimilating live collaboration functionality into Acrobat?

Lynch: "From a marketing standpoint, I always say 'It can't be *that* hard;' but from an engineering standpoint, there certainly are some challenges.

One of the things that both companies have always brought to our respective solutions is great passion. It's been exciting to see the two teams work together in forging a roadmap for how the synchronous and asynchronous worlds can come together and be more seamless-to start blurring the lines where collaboration is occurring.

We've made some great advances with Acrobat Connect. You can jump into a real-time meeting with a one-click button from either Acrobat or Reader. There's a lot more we'd like to do in the future to solve some technical problems that we weren't able to do in this initial release. What's especially exciting for me is that there's no shortage of ideas, both internally at Adobe and from our customers, who keep coming up with suggestions on how we can help solve their business problems."

Foss: You've been quoted as saying a lot of people don't really understand how Web conferencing can be used effectively. How will Adobe address that with Acrobat Connect? What do you envision as some of the primary uses?

Lynch: "The most difficult hurdle-similar to Acrobat-is the extent of additional functionality that is really there that people don't ordinarily think of that they could use with real-time conferencing.

An example: Acrobat Connect has a collaboration-builder SDK for building Flash applications that work within real-time meetings. They can be highly interactive-can really change the experience of a web meeting. It's not just screen sharing anymore; it could be something like a Jeopardy-like quiz that you use to train your sales force. Or it could be an interactive, real-time inventory system that is tied to a back-end system. It's really unlimited in what you could do, and it changes the mindset of what can be done inside a real-time meeting.

Acrobat is really not just about static documents anymore, it's about living, intelligent documents that provide a lot of additional value, with features like markup and commenting, and the ways you can control, combine and now collect information in forms. It's a lot more than what people naturally think of. The challenge for us is to get a lot more documents out there that are more interactive and alive.

For example, I was remodeling my house recently and one of the things we were doing was a closet design. I received a PDF file from one of the closet companies containing two different layouts they were proposing. I marked it up with comments and sent it back. The owner said 'How did you do that? I didn't know you could do that.' They already had the capability, I just had to show them how to turn it on and explain that they can let *all* of their customers do it with the free Adobe Reader. It's a great awakening moment that reveals another way to streamline processes."

Foss: This new product, as well as Acrobat in general and numerous other Adobe products and solutions, competes directly with offerings from Microsoft. That rivalry has been much publicized in recent months, especially in relation to Adobe's opposition to Microsoft integrating support for PDF in the Office 12 suite and the new XPS document format in its Vista OS. Doesn't that fuel the notion that Adobe is perpetuating a double standard-since other third-party applications and even operating systems include this functionality-and that PDF is not exactly the open standard that Adobe promotes it to be?

Lynch: "Adobe PDF is an open standard. We publish the specification and make it available for free-no restrictions and no royalties for hundreds of companies and independent software vendors that use it. What is unique is that Microsoft is essentially a declared monopolist-the only declared monopolist I can think of in the software industry. As such, they are legally obligated to work under specific rules and requirements. Our concern is that the PDF standard not become fragmented, that everyone can continue to use and trust it, that it remains consistent. Microsoft in the past has shown a propensity to take standards, evolve them in a proprietary way and usually offer an alternative to the standard as well. That's a concern, especially since they are, in fact, doing this at a time when they are offering an alternative in the form of XPS. We're just looking for a fair playing field. When a monopolist is involved, there are different rules."

Foss: In the past, new versions of Acrobat have typically addressed the needs of specific vertical market segments. True again with Acrobat 8?

Lynch: "In addition to the existing markets-such as CAD-for which we've continued to add more features, we're also leveraging some of the new and enhanced horizontal features. In Acrobat 8, one area for which I think we've done a nice job is the legal community. We've added some very specific industry features, like Redaction, which is the ability to remove and black out text and graphics. There has been a series of news stories during the last couple years where somebody drew a black box over something in a document, and then later someone figured out you could just cut and paste to access the actual hidden text.

Redaction in Acrobat 8 actually removes it, including all of the associated metadata. That's very common in legal documents-for example, if you have the name of a minor that can't be publicly released. Other legal features include Bates Numbering, which is a way to organize all of the different documents associated with a case in some legally sequenced number ordering because each document has to retain its own single, separate document identity-it helps to be able to organize the documents without combining them into one, big document.

Associated with that are some more horizontal features that certainly also apply-such as 'packaging.' With Acrobat 7, you can combine multiple PDFs into a single PDF. With Acrobat 8, you can not only do that, but you can also bring them in as a package so that all of the constituent documents are still separate PDFs-necessary in the legal industry and a number of others-but you can still transport them as a single PDF. It retains its 'container' characteristics.

What that also lets you do is apply digital signatures to each document separately; every time you change a particular document in a package doesn't invalidate those with signatures, which would happen if you combined them all into a single PDF file.

With Acrobat 8, you can also now apply digital signatures with Reader. If you have Acrobat 8 Pro, you can enable anyone to digitally sign a document with the free Reader. Forms is another good example-we've enabled form fill-in and save from Reader. It's also easy now to scan in a form, let Acrobat analyze it and create the form fields, send it out, collect all the information by e-mail and save the submitted data to a spreadsheet. These enhancements are going to help people understand and see what can be done with Adobe PDF and Acrobat beyond the typical static-document creation. It's really going to democratize those capabilities."

Foss: Following the release of Acrobat 8, what's the next big challenge and goal for Adobe's Knowledge Worker Business Unit (KWBU) related to the continuing integration of Macromedia and Adobe technologies?

Lynch: "To really continue to market and evangelize all of the great capabilities that are available in Acrobat 8 and Acrobat Connect today so people can take full advantage of the product to improve their workflows. Beyond that, we've already begun our concepts and thinking about the next version. We'll continue to work on bringing the asynchronous document nature of Acrobat and the synchronous, real-time meeting nature of Acrobat Connect together more tightly and more seamlessly. In the next version [beyond Acrobat 8], you're going to see a lot more integration.

This is really the first major release from the combined companies-Acrobat is the first one out the door. It's a great combination."