Good sign: Conference that practices what expert speakers preach
The now-concluded Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference in Minneapolis not only offered attendees useful information about the varied applications of Adobe Acrobat & PDF, but sent them home with a great example of event organizers practicing what they preach.
Many sessions included references to and demonstrations of some of the new Acrobat 9 features — among them the PDF Portfolio capability that is an enhancement of the PDF Packages feature introduced in Acrobat 8. The conference website offers most of the speaker presentations as individual downloads, a process that requires a lot of manual effort and results in a folder/directory of seemingly unrelated files — in a variety of file types — with uncertain content (judgments often based on cryptic filenames).
To save them the effort, registered attendees were each provided with a flash drive containing all of the available presentations. Better than the download-time savings, what the conference audience found on the drives was not an assorted collection of files, but rather a single, organized PDF Portfolio containing all of the presentations, complete with detailed descriptions of the content of each session.
It gave attendees an opportunity to actually experience some of the benefits that they heard discussed in many of the sessions, and likely intrigued a number of them to want to create similar PDF Portfolios of their own for their respective companies or organizations.
You can find other sources of inspiration in our PDF Portfolio Gallery on AcrobatUsers.com. And if you create something you’re proud of and are willing to share with our community, you could submit it in our Acrobat 9 PDF Portfolios contest — the fast-approaching deadline is October 7.
Another date to put on the calendar is next year’s Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference: September 22-24, 2009 in Minneapolis. Kudos to the Easel Solutions staff who organized this year’s great event!
