Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

There’s always the dilemma — greater for some than others, and typically more complicated according to the size of an organization and its range of deployment — on when and/or whether to upgrade when a major upgrade to a software program begins shipping. Such is the case again for Acrobat customers, with the recently announced new version expected to become available in November, according to Adobe.

You can already preorder Acrobat 8 from the Adobe Store — free shipping if ordered by October 31 — and from various other online software depots. With its September 18 product announcement, Adobe began to describe some of the key new and updated features, even listing the proverbial 10 reasons users will want to buy Acrobat 8. OK, is anyone surprised Adobe is encouraging sales by suggesting this is a significant new version?

It’d be more than self-serving promotion if an independent business and technology operation like Gartner, Inc., with hundreds of respected analysts and consultants, listed the benefits of upgrading. Almost on cue, Gartner Research weighed in Monday with an analysis titled “Adobe Boosts Market Position With Acrobat 8 Capabilities.” [PDF: 111kb]

In a glowingly positive analysis of Acrobat 8 and Acrobat Connect, the three-page Gartner document is high on — among other things — the latest, long-requested Reader-enablement capabilities:

“Adobe has also augmented its traditional desktop focus with an increasingly robust server architecture that includes some content management capabilities, transformation engines, streaming servers and collaboration hubs. In addition, the new Adobe Reader addresses the concerns of those who use the product to fill out forms — and who have been frustrated by their inability to save filled-in data — by allowing them to save their input in a new copy of the form, using Adobe Reader enabled by Acrobat 8 Professional or Acrobat 3D version 8. In addition, those products enable users to digitally sign documents with Reader.”

The Gartner analysts conclude with two recommendations:

• “Enterprises already dependent on Acrobat for design, packaging and delivery of documents should consider this to be a critical upgrade.”

• “Casual Acrobat users whose primary occupation is creative and who also use Creative Suite may want to wait until 2007, when the new Acrobat will be bundled with Creative Suite 3. Until then, it is also available in Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium along with Dreamweaver 8.”

The AcrobatUsers.com advisory council members have made the quarterly pilgrimage to San Jose for today’s third group meeting, a chance for us all to evaluate the past few months — the buildup to the recent Acrobat 8 announcement — and to discuss and plan for our forthcoming coverage leading to the product’s slated release in November.

But while waiting for the day-long session to begin, I wanted to quickly point to a relevant online item about some of Acrobat 8’s new features aimed at specific vertical markets — in this case, the legal community. There’s a listing of those key features for legal professionals on Adobe.com, but Law.com offers a user perspective in a piece titled “Adobe Acrobat Updates Likely to Lure Lawyers.”

The author, Brett Burney, the legal practice support coordinator at Thompson Hine in Cleveland, OH, describes the benefits of the new redaction tool and the Bates Numbering capabilities. In addition, he says “Acrobat has evolved as a perfect tool for interactive forms.”

Burney also contemplates how the industry can utilize the new Web conferencing features available in Acrobat Connect — formerly Macromedia Breeze — an add-on, real-time collaboration service being introduced with Acrobat 8. “I see Connect as a huge boon for attorneys in remote offices working together on the same document without having to e-mail it back and forth for a week,” he says.

We’d love to hear some of your opinions, especially any users who are also working in the legal field and who use Acrobat and PDF extensively. Add your comments below.

OK, it’s time to head off to today’s advisory council shindig.

A few months back in this blog I pointed to the Creative Suite Video Podcast by Terry White of Adobe Systems that features tips and brief tutorials on the Adobe suite applications, including Acrobat 7. White posted a bonus episode early this week, offering “a taste of what to expect in Acrobat 8 Professional.”

The 23-minute clip, which can be viewed in iTunes or with Apple’s QuickTime player, walks through the new program interface, points out that the Mac version is a Universal Binary application for the newer Intel Macs and shows off some of the new, task-based functionality. White promises “a lot more about Acrobat 8 in upcoming Creative Suite podcast episodes.” He also points out that registered owners of CS2 can get both Acrobat 8 Professional and Dreamweaver 8 as part of the CS 2.3 Premium upgrade by “basically paying the same price ($159) that an Acrobat [7 Professional] user would pay just to get their Acrobat upgrade.” (Adobe GoLive remains part of the suite with the premium upgrade, White adds.)

As mentioned in my first Acrobat 8-related blog post just minutes after Adobe’s official announcement went public, several online events were slated for today to introduce the user community to the product in a series of brief interactive demos — utilizing Acrobat Connect Professional — and to provide a brief update on AcrobatUsers.com.

I monitored the first session earlier today, in part to see which features drew the most interest and what types of questions people have at this point. That’ll help us in developing useful articles and information for the website.

We obviously weren’t able to send out our announcement of the Acrobat 8 webinar until Adobe broke the news, and some users have said they didn’t receive the information about today’s events until after the series had begun, or encountered a problem trying to log in.

That doesn’t mean they can’t learn about the new version and see the demos given by Lori DeFurio and Pooja Goyal of Adobe Systems and by expert users Ted Padova, Leonard Rosenthol, Duff Johnson and Thom Parker. The sessions are all being recorded and the best of the three will be posted and made available on AcrobatUsers.com later this week, I’m told. We’ll also summarize and publicly answer the most commonly asked questions from these sessions. Watch for a reference and link from our homepage in the coming days.

Here’s another educational opportunity: You can watch or download a pair of (QuickTime) video podcasts featuring Adobe’s Rick Brown, presented by PodTech.net. In the first, Brown gives an informal, 20-minute demonstration of Acrobat 8, highlighting the new user interface and a number of the new and improved features. In the second, Brown explains why Adobe is continuing to invest in Acrobat.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be highlighting and explaining in greater detail some of the changes you can expect to find when Adobe Acrobat 8 begins shipping later this year. Already our select team of Acrobat-expert bloggers has shared a variety of first impressions within hours of the official announcement.

In my previous blog post, I mentioned the new “Getting Started” window that’s designed to introduce you to the new program and offer guidance on how to accomplish various tasks — some old, some new. No doubt there’s going to be a learning curve even for experienced users as to where some tools and functions now appear within the Acrobat menus. It’s a common experience that users don’t always realize that certain “wished-for” capabilities already exist within the program, and reshuffling the locations from version to version probably adds to that perception.

On the other hand, it creates more opportunities for personal “Eureka moments” when you discover a new tool or feature while looking for another. Even long-time users note such experiences, and Acrobat 8 will surely inspire similar enlightening encounters.

Something I mentioned in “First Look: Adobe Acrobat 8” is a significant difference in how Acrobat displays PDF files. Unlike reorganizing the location of certain tools, which is not blatantly obvious to the user at first glance, the new way Acrobat displays PDFs is anything but a subtle change — and it’s much for the better, seems to me, once you adjust to the new look.

For sake of comparison, the following illustration from the Acrobat 7 Help document shows that version’s work area.

The displayed PDF is almost engulfed by the application toolbars, How-To window, status bar and navigation pane. The PDF is alloted whatever space is left, which in this example, isn’t much.

Contrast that with how a PDF file — in this case, Adobe’s overview of Acrobat 8 — is displayed in Acrobat 8 Professional. Even when you open any of the associated panes indicated by the narrow strip of left-side icons, they open only to the left of the document rather than surround it.

Relatively speaking, you barely notice the application; instead, the document commands center stage. The latter approach seems far preferable.

Do you agree? Express your preference in the comment box below.

When you launch Acrobat 8 Professional — just announced [PDF: 55kb] by Adobe Systems and expected to ship in November — you’ll see this …

The new “Getting Started with Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional” window lists eight task-oriented categories, comprised of the most commonly used capabilities and tools, several which are new to the program. We’ll be introducing you to the new tools and features in the coming weeks in articles, interviews and blog posts.

But for starters, there are several special online meetings on Tuesday, September 19, where you can get a detailed introduction to the next generation of the expanding Acrobat family. Scheduled times are:

• 6:00 am PT/9:00 am ET
• 3:00 pm PT/6:00 pm ET
• 6:00 pm PT/9:00 pm ET

The largest tragedy from September 11, 2001 — as the many media tributes are reminding us today — was the senseless loss of thousands of lives and the untold number of lives adversely affected by the deaths resulting from the infamous terrorist attacks in three U.S. locations. Secondarily, the financial impact and the lingering health problems of rescue and recovery teams add to the cruelty of the generation-defining incidents of five years ago today.

A quick search of the Internet reveals how today’s technologies allow a modern-day news event like 9/11 to be extensively chronicled, analyzed and remembered. A fair amount of PDF-based material, especially the various official reports and proceedings generated by the attacks and their aftermath, helps to recount the human tragedy and the related acts of heroism from many perspectives.

As well it should, much of the post-9/11 analysis and reflection deals with the lives lost and the lives changed. The mourning will last a lifetime for the unfortunate, innocent people and families that were directly victimized.

Taking a step back from the emotion and scale of the human loss, New York also lost something with a more symbolic value — its spiraling World Trade Center towers, which came crashing down the same day each was intentionally hit by hijacked commercial airliners.

“The World Trade Center Remembered” [PDF: 64kb] offers an interesting assessment of the significance of the WTC, both prior to 9/11 and since. Written by Ned Kaufman, a consultant specializing in cultural heritage, historical preservation and public history, it was published in a 2002 newsletter of the Association for Art History.

Kaufman notes his personal perspective after carefully observing the WTC for several years:

“The towers were so big and projected their bigness with such profound simplicity that they seemed to exist in the realm of sky and wind, rather than that of architecture. New York’s harbor is a vast area, filled with air and light and the reflections of moving water, overarched by an immense sky. The towers, sited on the promontory of lower Manhattan, registered the moods of light and weather in a way that only things of great size and immeasurable scale can do–things that are there with a bigness too big to grasp. When you looked at the towers you saw not just buildings but the imprint of the place itself, the sky coming down to earth, the impress of sun, sea, and wind sweeping across a continent. A shadow cast by one of the towers was not just bigger, but qualitatively different from those of ordinary buildings–it didn’t belong to architecture at all; it was a phenomenon of nature.”

Now you see only a still sadly symbolic hole.

With another school year getting underway in many locales, both educators and students will be looking for new ways to harness technology to enhance the learning process. In other aspects of school management — from K-12 to colleges and universities — administrators are also continually on the lookout for ways to streamline processes with changing technological solutions. Among those being widely adopted at all levels are Acrobat and PDF, as can be verified by browsing the assorted case studies in the Education area of Adobe.com.

Previously we profiled Ali Hanyaloglu of Adobe Systems, the company’s Technical Evangelist for Acrobat in Education, as someone who plays a key role in helping to promote the use of Acrobat in and around the classroom environment. But there’s another person outside the company, as Ali was quick to note and credit, whose efforts have contributed significantly to the same cause.

Steve Adler says he first discovered Acrobat about 10 years ago when working as a high school physics teacher in the Northern Valley Regional High School District in New Jersey. By 1997 — Acrobat 3.0 era — Adler says he “had students take existing presentations and design a functional interface and add web content and rich media.” There are some today who still consider PDF as suitable only for to-be-printed documents, so it’s obvious Adler was among the minority who grasped the potential early on.

Since then, he has worked with teachers, administrators and students at his
high school and with others around the country. In addition, he offers training and consulting in the publishing, legal, engineering and insurance markets for companies in the New York area. Adler also teaches a curriculum design course with Acrobat at Stanford University’s Digital Media Academy each summer.

At his school, Adler helped develop an Acrobat-based teaching tool that utilizes audio commenting with PDF files for instruction and assessment. “Users of Reader-enabled commenting can participate,” he says, “and teachers and students can exchange information electronically. It’s great for portfolio assessment. In addition, with the proper language kit installed, Acrobat can serve as a very efficient, low-cost language lab. Students can read, speak and type in just about any language. The same is true with music and recitals. Students can listen to audio comments of instrumental recordings and respond back in a efficient manner using the free Reader.”

Probably his most visible contribution to the educational community is the Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Curriculum Guide, available for download by educators on Adobe.com. It’s a series of topical lessons that explore the key features of Acrobat. It includes interactive exercises, based on related resource and project files.

“The Acrobat Curriculum guide evolved as I saw some key needs for the
teaching and understanding of Acrobat,” Adler says. “It consists of about 12 lessons with 40 activities that allow teachers to teach appropriate areas and others to teach themselves. The assets provided make it easy to get started and there are ideas for taking each lesson further.”

The guide is intended for certified educators to use in educational institutions. Non-educators and other companies are able to license it for a nominal fee. According to Adler, it has been adopted by some large organizations across the world for training their staff. More information is available at Adler’s Guide Educational Systems site. He also sells an eight-hour Acrobat 7 training video featuring 145 lessons, available from the Virtual Training Company.