Annual PDF show features content for technology managers as well as for the IT people who implement their plans—and, as always, for end users in publishing and office settings.Not only did Acrobat 7 get a makeover late last year, but so did the 1.6
PDF spec and many of the LiveCycle PDF server products. And, don't forget, many
third-party software developers of plug-ins and standalone utilities and
applications have either announced updates based on the new Adobe software or
will soon. So lots will be happening at AGI's April 20-21 2005 Adobe &
Acrobat PDF Conference this
spring, whose program was announced late last month.
Chris Smith, head of AGI Training, says that prepress and multimedia publishing matters always
draw strong interest at his shows. But this year, Smith has seen an expansion in
interest up the corporate ladder: CIO types are figuring out which business
processes can be committed to PDF via servers running software from the Adobe
LiveCycle line or other systems driven by other vendors like ActivePDF or
Appligent. And the IT people charged with implementing these changes are paying
close attention to the PDF world too, as they consider how their businesses can
benefit from PDF forms technology and as they wrangle with Section 508
accessibility issues and how to make their PDFs compliant with the
regulation.
"It's the first opportunity for PDF users, developers, and IT
professionals to get an in-depth look at Acrobat 7 as well as the other
technologies that surround the PDF format," says Smith, who says he changed the
names of the show's content tracks to "user," "technical" and "management" so
attendees can better figure out what's for them. "We try to group these sessions
using tracks to help users understand what type of content is going to be
covered... [but] attendees can move from one track to another while they're
there."
Accordingly, the conference includes sessions that cover management and
IT's specific concerns, such as PDF security and electronic signatures,
LiveCycle implementation, paper-to-PDF conversion issues, and designing PDF
forms workflows in general. Presenters will also show how early adopters are
using PDF/A for archiving and PDF/E for engineering in real life, marking some
of the first opportunities on the trade show circuit to see these developing
standards in action—as opposed to the mostly theoretical discussions at past
conferences.
Desktop Acrobat users—including those in the creative community charged
with making PDFs for print and multimedia—haven't been left behind. Topics for
discussion include what Smith calls the "significant and useful" new PDF
preflight tools included in Acrobat 7, how JDF can enable workflow automation,
and special issues involved with publishing architectural and engineering data
as PDFs and how the new version addresses them. Nuts-and-bolts stuff for
advanced users includes new wrinkles in Acrobat JavaScript and how to exploit
them.
What in Acrobat 7 is most exciting for the end users who use it as a
day-to-day office productivity application? Of all the features built into the
program for the office setting, Smith says that he personally has found the new
PDF Organizer tool has helped him the most, making the mass of PDFs scattered
throughout his hard drive easier to manage. On the grander scale of business and
enterprise, he feels that Adobe's bundling of LiveCycle Designer 7.0 free with
Windows Acrobat will make a big impact.
For office users, he says, the review-and-commenting tools offered in
Acrobat 7—where anyone with Acrobat 7 on his or her machine can initiate a
review cycle in which Reader 7 users can participate—have the potential to be
very popular. That is, if the powers that be at the IT manager and CIO levels
promote the features and educate desktop users on how to use these
tools.
"I think it's going to help, for example, business-client relationships,
where a business needs to share a PDF with a customer that needs to be marked up
and returned," Smith says. And, he says, he thinks that the new feature will not
only hasten review cycles but also protect privacy, because currently many of
these comment cycles might start out with an e-mailed PDF to a person who has
Reader installed on his or her machine but end up as marked-up faxes or
hardcopies when it becomes apparent that the person can't do a review using
Reader.
While applications like Microsoft Word have features that can track
edits, PDF is a better format for it, especially in regulated industries, he
adds.
"It's a matter of control and integrity of the document," Smith says.
"[I]f a source document has been created in an engineering document and you need
to maintain control, and… the legal profession would be another [appropriate
venue] … PDF allows the owner of the document to maintain integrity while
receiving input via the new commenting and markup
tools."
