London Acrobat User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

February 6, 2007

London AUG members were treated to a taste of Adobe’s Connect technology this week when they were invited to their very first online meeting.

Members had the choice of either VOIP (Voice over IP) audio direct to their computer, or a free 0800 landline number – but interestingly the vast majority of attendees voted with their feet and chose the former.

A high quality video stream from Adobe UK’s headquarters using Acrobat Connect Enterprise meant that participants were able to see Acrobat 8 Professional in action, and Ian demonstrated a number of new features including one very cute new option – ‘Mailmerge to PDF’. In Acrobat 8, it is now extremely simple to generate personalised PDF documents from Microsoft Word – whether letters, flyers, receipts or invoices – and even email them to recipients automatically if required.

The new Shared Review feature was shown, and also the great new Forms technology, including Forms Recognition (we saw a ‘passive’ PDF form taken from the Internet being instantly recognised and transformed into a fillable form) and the bundled LiveCycle Designer 8, which makes bringing in PDF artwork for use as a form background very easy indeed.

The AUG remains committed to channelling product feedback from end-users, so at the end of the meeting we used the ‘Poll’ and ‘Q&A’ features of Connect to ask members for their views on Acrobat. Of the new features, the clear favourite seemed to be Email Archiving.”