Acrobat 7 can already be downloaded from the Adobe Web site, as well as the brand-new edition of the free Reader. The software hasn’t yet officially shipped, but Adobe maintains that it will by the end of 2004. Interviewing Adobe director of Acrobat Product Marketing Pam Deziel, PDFZone drills a little deeper into the new version’s fine points to give users a better idea of what they can expect for their money.

PDFzone: First things first--Acrobat’s still on target for delivery this month?

Pam Deziel: We’re working on it. In a meeting earlier this week [this interview was conducted Dec. 17], my boss said, “I think we’re at nine centimeters!”

It’s looking pretty good.

PDFzone: You worked on early versions of Acrobat--what’s it like to come back to the Acrobat team in the 7 era?

Deziel: I walked back into a pretty sweet situation where the product had real momentum and incredible popularity--it’s been really positive all the way around.

PDFzone: Could you have imagined in the early days of Acrobat that it could be pushed into the government and enterprise markets as it’s been so far?

Deziel: We did. Not everybody remembers, but we had a direct sales force dedicated to Acrobat from the initial 1.0 release. We had some good initial success in financial services in New York City, and we had real traction from the beginning, and it’s been building over the years.

PDFzone: Could you have imagined Acrobat evolving into what it is today, feature-wise?

Deziel: In the course of developing [Acrobat] 2.0, we had to cut from 700 APIs to 500 APIs. We kind of had an inkling of what kind of things might be available from the very beginning.

I remember sitting in on an interview with John Warnock very early on and hearing him tell a Business Week reporter, “Acrobat is like an operating system,” and cringing at the time. I thought, ‘Gee, John, you really don’t want to be inviting Bill Gates to be scrutinizing and worrying about us,” but I think that was really a very early indicator of Acrobat as a platform and what we have now as the Intelligent Document Platform.

PDFzone: To you, what is the most significant feature of Acrobat 7?

Deziel: Certainly, the enablement of review and comment into Reader [when initiated in Pro] is a fundamental extension of the business model with 2.0 when we made the Reader free. I think the ability that it gives our customers to let everybody participate in PDF-based workflows is a next-generation functionality that will drive a lot of new business and is really well aligned with the virtual teams and extended enterprises that we see today.

PDFzone: Many of PDFzone’s visitors kvetch about the time it takes to open Acrobat and Reader, and to create a PDF. Tell us about the performance improvements Adobe’s put into Acrobat 7.

Deziel: We worked on a couple different areas in particular: One, improving launch time with both the Standard and Professional product as well as the Reader. The feedback we’ve had is that it’s pretty darn snappy.

We also worked a lot on performance of PDF generation. We’d take some time [to generate PDFs in the past] because what we’re doing with our PDF makers is, really, generating accessible PDFs and maintaining some of the information and structure in the file that gives us intelligence in the PDF document. But over time, we were paying a penalty for doing that so we spent some time in this release improving PDF generation performance.

Those are really the two areas we focused on. I think we had some pretty good success.

PDFzone: What would you like to add or say in sum, now that you’ve got the PDFzone user community’s collective ear bent?

Deziel: We’re pretty excited about not only the enablement of review and comment in the Reader but the integration of the LiveCycle Policy Server. The notion of being able to dynamically manage the rights associated with individual documents has got people pretty excited. Policy Server will ship simultaneously with Acrobat 7. We’re seeing a lot of incredible promise of leverage into enterprise that we get from Acrobat integration with our server products.

The 3-D functionality that we’ve added to Acrobat 7 has the engineering community in particular looking at Acrobat as something that really might form the basis of real solutions for workloads in the architecture, engineering, construction and manufacturing segments.