Michael Eisner will keynote the Aquent Graphics Institute (AGI) 2008 Adobe Acrobat & PDF Conference April 30-May 1 at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando, an ironic choice considering his tumultuous 2005 ouster from the company chronicled in the tell-all book DisneyWar. Eisner's made headlines recently debating the future of Web video with Mark Cuban at SXSW, hawking his All-For-Nots Web-only sitcom, and buying baseball trading-card stalwart Topps.

His keynote to the Acrobat conference—paired with the CRE8 Summit that covers Web and print publishing technologies—likely will be long on big-picture media vision and short on analysis of hot topics in the Acrobat space such the future of PDF forms workflows, if it's anything like the riveting but decidedly far-from-Acrobat Al Gore keynote last year.

Expect more of the same big-picture perspective from Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft director of the .NET developer platform team, who keynotes the second day of the show.

"I'm really interested to hear more about Microsoft's tools for securely delivering a variety of content types across multiple platforms," says Aquent president and show organizer Chris Smith. "As more content moves into the realm of interactive and video content, the same people who currently manage PDF now have needs for finding ways to share and distribute new media."

Smith has slotted well-known — at least to PDF developers and technology veterans — Swiss expert Max Wyss for a third keynote, which will showcase his own particular flavor of "smart PDF."

His past presentations have included jaw-dropping, bleeding-edge demos of interactive PDFs.

Other PDF luminaries on the docket include Duff Johnson, CEO of Document Solutions; Magicomm's Michael Jahn, a PDF prepress and e-book guru; and FormRouter CEO Jim Healy, whose company uses the Web-services model to take the features of Adobe's LiveCycle "Cadillac" PDF forms workflows to small and medium-sized organizations.

In the wake of PDF's recent approval of an ISO standard, several conference speakers key to that process will be breaking down its likely impact to the future of the document format.

The sole Adobe speaker will be James Lockman, who will present on packaging design in Acrobat 3D. Smith adds that some of the most-requested content among attendees for his 2008 conference sessions — reflecting the hot issues in their workplaces — revolve around the use of PDF in the office environment: Document review, sharing, security, storage and distribution.

Breakout sessions will focus on familiar specialty topics such as applying PDF to print and Web workflows, server distribution and for data collection via forms.

Right now's an interesting time for Adobe and Acrobat, as Adobe faces key challenges, Smith says. Adobe has tried several times to create special versions of Acrobat for different market segments such as print/prepress and architectural/engineering, "without much luck," as he puts it. "

In doing so they've lost their focus on the core business problems that Acrobat can solve and lost their connection with their Acrobat customer base," Smith says. "The good news is that Adobe has a great opportunity to reconnect with their customers as they introduce the next version of Acrobat sometime over the next year.

"I'm also concerned that PDF risks losing its status as being a trusted way to share files. There have been so many reported security threats recently, reports that PDF documents hiding malicious code then take over Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat. As PDF has become an open standard, we need to hear more from Adobe about the severity of these issues and how we can be certain that new enhancements that are added to Acrobat can be trusted, otherwise IT managers are going to be reluctant to upgrade."