Opinion: The chip maker's chief strategist offers deep thoughts on how developers can make PDFs more friendly to mobile computing."I just don't get why Garth Brooks would show up on Sesame Street," said my teenage niece as we watched my 2-year-old blithely counting along with the Count. "Weird people show up all the time, but why Garth Brooks?"
"Anything Garth Brooks does," I replied without hesitation, "he does to sell records."
"But 2-year-olds don't get allowances; they don't buy records, right?" Good question, I thought, at which time it occurred to me that at least some of the moms and dads who have to suffer through the Muppet menagerie must also be country-music fans. They also might be inspired to pick up the singer's latest disc because, vapid as Brooks' material may be, next to Elmo and Zoe, it looks like high art.
I'm sorry for the awkward analogy, Garth. But it's the same reason that Intel, a hardware maker, has a PDF strategy: Just like you want to sell records, they want to sell more chips.
The logic behind Intel's PDF strategy goes something like this: Look at how people are using your computers, including what software they're using. Talk to the biggest software developers that show up on your computers—such as Adobe—and lobby them to make their software utilize your computers' hardware resources better.
"We needed to come up with a way to work with the industry to retool the existing installed base of applications to function more effectively for mobile," says Chris Thomas, Intel chief strategist. "PDFs were designed to be mobile. You download them and use them and upload them. The addition of a Web services stack to the Reader and being able to move XML in and out transactionally is a very, very powerful change because it ... allows a mobile document to participate back in the corporation when connected in an occasionally connected fashion."
This strategy makes extra good sense when you realize that the computers Intel touts are laptops and mobile devices designed to work intermittently online and off (they refer to this as "occasionally connected"), hopping between Wi-Fi zones or wired networks.
And, here's the important part: Intel's strategy relies on increasing battery life.
"People think battery life is just an indication of how you've designed hardware," Thomas says. "But it's actually the software talking to the hardware that incurs the hit on battery, whether you spin up your disk drive, you hit your video even when it's not necessary, if you do or don't use memory and cache, or—the worst one out there—children's game security where you must [spin] the CD."
The more Intel lobbies software companies like Adobe to optimize their software for use on the Intel mobile hardware platform, the happier and more productive business users get, and the more money everyone makes, or so Intel's theory goes.
Next Page: Beyond FormRouter
Intel's PDF strategy extends beyond Adobe to FormRouter. Not many people know that forms filled out in Reader can't be saved offline unless they're forms distributed by Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions Server, the large enterprise server that unlocks special features in Reader to enable "local save" on a computer's hard drive.
Reader Extensions comes with a large-enterprise price tag of five, even six figures. For the rest of us, FormRouter, an ASP that figures into Intel's Mobilized strategy, licenses Reader Extensions and offers small businesses little pieces of that functionality without the big investment.
FormRouter also accomplishes one of the major goals of Intel's Mobilized strategy: enabling people to fill out forms offline while they're on a plane or otherwise disconnected but still have the time to accomplish work and "store forward" their filled-out forms, which then will automatically sync to an online server when their laptops reconnect in the next Wi-Fi zone they happen upon.
"Organizations are losing massive efficiencies by not utilizing laptops correctly with mobilized forms because a lot of forms can't be filled out in one sitting, and people aren't always connected to the Internet," says Jim Healy, founder of FormRouter, which—upon Thomas' suggestion—built a desktop utility for FormRouter customers to manage their offline form-filling activities and also designed services that route data collected with FormRouter forms into Salesforce.com's system.
"By giving people the capacity to fill out these forms in a mobilized way, we can help inspire people to take advantage of online forms, which feeds into the paperless office concept, which saves the government money and creates more efficiency."
Healy doesn't characterize the relationship between Intel and FormRouter as one where money's exchanged between the two companies. Instead it's a tit-for-tat where Intel gets another tool in its Mobilized arsenal and FormRouter receives the benefit of an Intel chief strategist touting its services behind closed doors FormRouter could never get through—as well as some not-so-closed doors, such as from the keynote lectern at last year's Dreamforce, Salesforce's annual convention.
The interesting part about all this talk is that it's far from Adobe headquarters, and it's evolving straight from market need: If people were using, say, Microsoft InfoPath more than PDF, Thomas probably would be hitching his wagon to that instead.
A forward-looking thinker with an eye on how the future will unfold, Thomas foresees more in-document widgets that can help PDF owners "store forward" information about who used a file and when—and did what to it.
These functions probably sound familiar to the prepress PDF world, as well as to Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server customers, but Thomas sees their usefulness expanding far beyond those limited audiences.
Thomas also sees PDF as a better way for online businesses to manage their relationships with customers, an upgrade from current HTML models that force customers to stay online to do business and require them to remember or request forgotten user names and passwords. Those machinations, at least for Thomas, kill many transactions he might otherwise make.
If, for example, car-rental companies, hotels and airlines were to port their reservation systems to PDF, prefilling forms with account numbers and even keeping tabs on where a traveler is—via, say automatic e-mails that send themselves from a user's laptop or other device when a plane lands—they might be better prepared for a customer's arrival and prevent time wasted standing in lines and filling out paper forms.
The benefit could go both ways, saving resources at the vendor end, too, as someone has to receive all those people and forms. Custom PDFs that manage security business transparently to the user—and allow users to work offline—would dovetail into Thomas' Mobilized world.
"Why does the concept of PDF as application seem so exciting?" Thomas asks, rhetorically. "It starts to be, in the nature of things like security. If I can send a PDF that I can lock things out of, or erase later, and I've got a service helping me do that, awesome. ... Digital signatures and signing capabilities are much more effective at the document level than trying to log in and do it in a system."
That, and—in Thomas' mind—if using those PDFs requires people to upgrade their laptops, could help sell a lot of Centrino machines.
