Adobe are really pushing the 3D element of Acrobat 8 [2] - todays seminar featured it quite heavily together with a number of other features - probably I would guess because Microsoft are touting Vistas glamorous Aero[4] and teasy Silverlight[3] with their nifty graphics and 3D demos and Adobe don’t want to be left out.

However, it does look like Adobe seem to be finally trying to position Acrobat as more than just a reader, and this makes a lot of sense. The new ‘technologies’, as I saw in the demo, in themselves seem nothing revolutionary: Redaction has been available in Word[1] for some time as a download, Form-filling can be done via Infopath[5] and Indexing is already handled by the likes of Google Desktop Search and MSN Desktop Search. Pulling these technologies together does seem like a good idea and harnessing the power of the widespread distribution of Acrobat should be the perfect answer but I can’t feeling it’s too little too late.

Perhaps if Adobe re-aligned the product more towards a Document Management or Document Library product then they may be onto something, making proper sense of the OCR and Indexing facility, but if I can achieve all of the above things already - why would I use Acrobat? The only real reason would be compatibility yet there’s the catch - to make really good use of the new features your partners also need Acrobat 8 (Reader at the least) and as some of the crowd pointed at at the Seminar, getting these partners to upgrade may not be as easy as it first seems.

I shall still get Acrobat 8, primarily because it’s likely that a number of our trading partners will use it, but as for putting on the general user desktop - for now I’ll stick to Reader.

References

[1] Office 2003 Add-in: Word Redaction v1.2 [online] 31st May 2007
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=028c0fd7-67c2-4b51-8e87-65cc9f30f2ed&displaylang=en

[2] Adobe Acrobat family [online] 31st May 2007
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/

[3] Microsoft Silverlight [online] 31st May 2007
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

[4] Experience Windows Vista: Windows Aero
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/experiences/aero.mspx

[5] Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/infopath/FX100487661033.aspx