Adobe announced Acrobat 7 today--the new version will ship by the end of the year if everything moves according to plan. While the new upgrade improves upon the last version, it’s not quite the earth-shattering change that came with Acrobat 6, when Adobe broke up Acrobat into three editions: Standard, Pro and Elements.

IT managers will likely welcome this quieter upgrade, in which Pro makes deeper inroads into the engineering and pre-press markets, while Standard becomes a more useful application for secure document sharing in the office environment.

“We’re really working hard to increase customer satisfaction and increase operational efficiency, particularly in this time of tighter budgets and smaller staffs,” says Marion Melani, Adobe senior product marketing manager. “There’s a lot of emphasis around meeting both internal corporate compliance policies and making sure you’re in compliance with privacy, disclosure and reporting, legislation.”

It used to be that desktop Acrobat was the PDF flagship product, but now it shares the stage with a number of Adobe applications for servers. For some people, Acrobat is a mere stepping stone, a trial integration of PDF into a company’s document workflow en route to a large server implementation.

For others, however, Acrobat remains the core product for PDF users in an organization. The Acrobat faithful may worry that the single-copy user is getting left behind as Adobe pushes its server products into large organizations, but Randy Swineford, another senior product marketing manager, says that’s not the case.

Adobe is mounting an ever-bigger push behind its LiveCycle server products, it’s true. But Adobe is also increasing efforts to sell Acrobat 7 boxes, too, Swineford says, because the markets for both types of software are expanding.

“With the Acrobat 7 family, we really concentrated on developing better integration with the server products, as well as really tuning the product to deliver to people who are working in sort of an ad-hoc fashion--doing documents individually or with groups of people,” Melani says. “The Acrobat 7 family is the glue. As the desktop processes become more repeatable or structured, you can scale up and add a server solution. Acrobat 7 is the hub between unstructured and structured workflows.”

So what’s new in Acrobat 7? There is a bushel basket of new features, but--keeping in mind that Acrobat 6 introduced many new features and was a very substantial upgrade--Adobe’s engineers in Acrobat 7 sped up and streamlined a lot of what was already there.

In addition to speeding up performance and reducing wait times, Swineford says “in many places, we collapsed the menu structures so you don’t have to go out through lots of different hierarchies.”

Some of the new features include:

• 3-D embedded data in PDFs: A new tool in Acrobat Pro supports the creation of 3-D objects as well as fine control over the zoom and view thereof.
• Improved security: Fewer steps are needed to set document-level security settings, and repeated steps can be memorized as “policies.”
• Microsoft Access, Visio PDFMakers: Now, reports, maps, charts and databases can be made into PDFs, with formatting preserved.
• Microsoft Publisher PDFMaker: Now, newsletters and other documents made with this office favorite can be made into PDFs, with formatting preserved.
• New Microsoft Outlook integration: Acrobat can “bind” messages sorted in Outlook or put together in a folder as a single PDF, so that one project’s emails can be kept together and be made a project document itself for circulation and archiving
• More streamlined AutoCAD PDF conversion: Layer control is integrated in the “create PDF” button.
• Faster paper-to-PDF conversion: In past versions, many settings needed to be specified and buttons pushed before text on paper turned into an OCR’ed, navigable, searchable, accessible PDF. Acrobat 7 makes this a one-click process.
• Exporting comments to Word docs: If you’ve made a PDF from a Word document and circulated it around for commenting, Acrobat can send those comments back to the original Word document, provided you’re running Acrobat and either Word 2002 or 2003 on a Windows machine.
• PDF Organizer interface: For heavy users who are lose track of their PDFs, search and history features help better locate files they need.
• Structured bookmarks: This feature helps automate the binding--and unbinding--of files within a PDF.
• Stamp palette: Do you frequently “stamp” things on documents you’re reviewing? You can make a stamp into a button on the toolbar or, for power users, a palette of frequently used stamps.
• Importing Acrobat comments into CAD files: If clients make comments on your drawings, you can bring them into the CAD file as a separate layer.
• Repairing errors in print preflight: Prepress users get new tools to correct printing inks, adjust color spaces and fix stroke weight problems, as well as converting preflight reports into PDFs for circulation among service providers and clients. Also, tools enable designers to flatten live transparencies, convert color spaces to CMYK and create trap presets for PostScript printing.