Opinion: The challenge is figuring out which group of users will show up at the meetings: engineers, prepress people, or forms-loving enterprise document folks?At first blush, it seems kind of weird: Adobe launching Acrobat user groups, with bona fide local-chapter infrastructure and all the trappings, as confirmed by Marketing Manager Pooja Goyal.
The idea itself isn't weird. Photoshop benefits from a user group community of artists, technicians and hobbyists saving the world from boring and fuzzy graphics. These enthusiasts also serve Adobe notice of needed new features in the next rev, and they expose bugs and other problems with the applications.
But user groups for Acrobat? Now, a dozen years and seven versions into the product lifecycle? That's the first peculiar facet of the notion.
"The objective of this whole initiative is twofold," Goyal says. "One, to encourage a stronger connection between the Acrobat user community and Adobe, and two, to enable online and face-to-face forums [where] users can interact with one another."
While Adobe does have a fairly robust online community for Acrobat users, Goyal says the user groups will help facilitate personal contact that isn't happening now between the company and its users.
Click here to read more about Adobe's plan for Acrobat user groups.
The other odd thing about Acrobat User Groups—we could call them AUGurs for short—is that it's simple to imagine the typical Photoshop user: creative types creating original digital art, or pros tuning up existing photographs for digital media.
But Acrobat users come from so many different places, it's hard to think of the average user. In my mind's eye I see them in office cubicles, IT executive suites, printing shops and multimedia design studios—at CAD drafting tables, and at home. They're cranking out PDFs as simple as a converted fax or an IRS Form 1040, or as complicated as a 3-D virtual-reality walk-through of an unbuilt skyscraper.
Goyal and her gang will try to suss out which of these users want groups when they unveil the concept at the PDF Conference Monday and Tuesday at the Crystal City Hilton in Washington D.C.
"It could be individual business users, it could be whole companies—we will just have to wait and see," Goyal says. "We are going out to the PDF Conference to talk to the users and get their input. In a few months we will have a better sense of it."
Those who would most benefit from these Acrobat User Groups are the users who either push PDF to its limits or receive lots of bad PDFs and are charged with the task of making them good. That should include:
• Forms designers. Talk about people with a tough job. Not only do they have to design forms, but they also have to make those forms plug into back-end databases that can actually use the information they contain. Throw in JavaScript and odd incompatibilities between Acrobat and LiveCycle Designer, and you've got yourself a person who needs professional help. On top of all that, they need to teach end users how to use and route their forms correctly.
• Engineers. Think you're so smart? Cram into a single PDF a pile of technical drawings, a budget, production specs, and parts lists for something as simple as a new toy or as complicated as a 40-story building. Now make sure that the graphics come out to scale and that the whole thing prints properly. If you are the one person in town who's figured out how to do this, a user group is the perfect place to support your peers still climbing the mountain.
• Prepress people. The ultimate place for a user group to put together a technical database of dos and don'ts when it comes to PDFs and local printers. What files trip up which presses that everyone sends files to? What Distiller settings do you use? What's the best preflight strategy? What plug-ins work best? Collecting answers to these and other questions would help the printers and production people in a city work together to make their workflows murderously efficient.
• Archivists. This new group of PDF users—working with the new PDF/A standard—will encounter many similar problems to those encountered by their prepress brethren. Comparing notes with the prepress people, and with each other, in a user-group setting will quickly get their knowledge base up to speed.
• The office user. As with musicians, the only way to get better at making good PDFs is to hang out with people who are better at it than you are. It would be a great service to all of us who consume PDF documents—gee, that's everyone with a pulse and an Internet connection—if all Acrobat newbies learned right off the bat how to structure a PDF intelligently with tables of contents, Web links, and other "101" features.
• Multimedia mavens. If you're working with Flash, animations, audio and interactive elements within a PDF, you need some like-minded friends to help you do it. Just thinking about a lot of these matters is far beyond the scope of the "FM" of "RTFM" fame.
Next Page: User groups won't help everyone.
The people who probably won't benefit from Acrobat user groups? The IT executive contemplating buying 50,000 copies next week. The dude who keeps e-mailing me asking why he can't create PDFs in Adobe Reader—and his brother who asks why he can't edit a PDF in Reader—probably wouldn't be good candidates, either.
Everyone in between on the PDF food chain could benefit. I put the emphasis on could. At this late date—part way between Acrobat 7 and 8—if it turns out this whole user group thing is a marketing ruse, shame on Adobe.
Apple's Automator can streamline PDF workflows. Click here to read more.
Goyal says that Adobe wants to interact with Acrobat users through the groups and will give them its corporate ear when it comes to suggesting new features.
PDF Conference organizer Carl Young, for one, loves the idea. He has seen firsthand the need for Acrobat user groups: He launched his own independent group (now defunct) in Phoenix in the 1990s.
"I started the PDF Conference because I was running the user group in Phoenix, and I saw a need for a bigger venue where people could come together and learn about Acrobat," he says. "This is sort of taking me back to my roots."
Acrobat user groups are a good idea, if the company grows the concept properly and actually listens to the people who show enough interest in the product to come to local meetings and post to the Web forums. Such groups have a real chance to encourage novel PDF uses and push the format's technological boundaries into new places.
But if it's just another "Tools for the New Work" in disguise, wake me up when it's over, please. I've already had enough New Work—for that matter, old work too—for one lifetime.
