Adobe this week unveiled its latest Acrobat tool: Acrobat Elements Server. It fills the gap left behind when Adobe changed Acrobat licensing to prevent single copies being used on servers and introduced Distiller Server-which sort of replaced it, but only for limited use in the prepress market.

No matter how you slice it, the Elements Server price ($22,500 per server or $28/user, 1,000 user minimum) is very comparable to Elements. This means that companies will be investing at least $22,500 for Acrobat Elements, so it's clear that Adobe is targeting companies with at least 1,000 potential PDF creators.

Small companies are still left to seek non-Adobe, third-party alternatives if they can't afford Acrobat Standard and Professional for all their employees who make PDFs.

"This product was really developed in direct response to our larger enterprise customers who want an easier and more cost-effective way to deploy PDF creation across the enterprise," said Adobe Product Marketing Manager Marty Krasilczuk. "It was designed with the IT professional and ISVs in mind."

To that end, Adobe recruited "some large banks" and independent software vendors in its pilot program before rolling out Elements Server, Krasilczuk says. Although ISVs are potential customers who might make PDF creation via Elements Server part of their own commercial products, Krasilczuk said one particular ISV in the pilot wasn't doing that. Instead, Acrobat Elements Server was used as a tool in its customer-relations management process.

But ISVs integrating Elements Server into their commercial products were part of the pilot-program mix, too. While Krasilczuk didn't name anyone in particular, she said to "think of the popular folks in the content management space" who are automating document processes and archiving them.

Elements Server has some nifty features that network administrators will enjoy, such as offsite PDF creation via the Web and choices for on-network creation that either e-mail a finished PDF to desktop users or create them via a "watched folder" metaphor.

Other wrinkles built into the software that will be appreciated by the people who administer network servers include centralized control of job options for PDF creation, a Web services API that can integrate PDF creation into complex document workflows, and support for Windows 2000 and XP Professional servers.

Adobe wrote specific support into Elements Server for Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Project, as well as Corel WordPerfect. As can be expected from the king of graphics software, image formats such as GIF and TIFF are supported as well as straight-up PostScript. Of course, it will turn any document that's been converted into RTF, .TXT or PostScript into a PDF as well.

Also, despite the fact that Elements Server is much cheaper per user than the higher line Acrobat products, it still offers some high-end features relevant to the office user, such as 128-bit encryption and document-level password protection.

While Adobe still hasn't come out with an inexpensive box for Acrobat--leaving single-copy sales of the $30-to-$50 PDF-creation tool to its competitors, such as Global Graphics, Data Becker, Scansoft and activePDF--Elements Server does offer enterprise IT managers a way to get some of Acrobat's functionality on a lot of desktops for a lot less cash than buying Acrobat Standard or Pro.

"That's hitting on some feedback we're very familiar with, having to do with the 1,000-user minimum," Krasilczuk said. "At the moment, we are targeting larger, enterprise-type customers with solutions like this. In terms of PDF creation by smaller numbers of people, they would be looking at purchasing the Acrobat Standard or Professional product."

If those two products are off the boards because they're too expensive or are feature overkill in an office that just needs basic PDF creation and cares not for prepress or extensive commenting tools, Krasilczuk said that "at this point, we don't have a lower cost PDF-creation solution that we make widely available, and we do know there are lots of competitors out there that target that low-end market."

Is such a product forthcoming from Adobe? Should IT managers contemplating a 500-copy Jaws PDF Creator purchase sit on their budget for, say, six months and see if Adobe comes out with a comparable option worth considering? In this regard, Adobe, as always, plays its cards close to the vest.

"There's nothing that prevents us from doing that . . . we're always exploring options," said Jonathan Knowles, worldwide evangelist for Adobe's Intelligent Document Business Unit. "We're thrilled to see that there are solutions out there that are PDF-based solutions. Who knows? We're always looking at the right thing to do for our customers."

For more information on Elements Server, visit Adobe here.