Adobe Beefs Up Acrobat Reader in Version 7.0 (
Page 1 of 2 )
Adobe aims at increased department penetration with Version 7.0's tighter integration with Microsoft's productivity, e-mail and content applications.Adobe Systems Inc. looks to meld its document management platform more firmly into business workflows as the company on Monday announces the next version of its Acrobat document interchange solution.
Version 7.0 expands the exchange capabilities of its reader application and features tighter integration with Microsoft Corp.s productivity and content applications.
As with previous versions, Adobe divides its Acrobat franchise into four products: the free Acrobat Reader application thats available for multiple operating systems; Acrobat Elements, a site-licensed PDF (Portable Document Format) application; Acrobat Standard, the entry-level toolset; and Acrobat Professional, its full-featured content creation and management package.
In addition, the company offers a range of DRM (digital rights management) capabilities with its Acrobat LifeCycle Server line.
With Acrobat 7.0, Adobe aims to place PDF at the center of departmental document workflows in the enterprise, said Pam Deziel, director of Acrobat product marketing to eWEEK.com. The refreshed Reader application is a part of that strategy.
Instead of just letting users read or print a document, the Reader 7.0 application now supports Acrobats commenting tools as well as permitting users to fill in PDF forms.
This reviewing feature was previously found in the paid Standard and Pro editions, which may have kept businesses needing to share and annotate documents on the existing the Office apps, particularly Word. Reviewing with the free Version 7.0 Reader is available through documents created with Acrobat Professional.
Acrobat 7.0 also incorporates greater integration with many Microsoft applications found standard in the enterprise, including the Internet Explorer browser.
Read whats due in Microsofts next version of the Office suite in "MS Office 12s Secrets Begin to Trickle Out."
For example, the Standard edition now lets users create PDFs from Office applications with the PDF Maker button; Acrobat 7.0 users on Windows will also gain this option for Access reports and Publisher projects.
Deziel pointed to Acrobat 7.0s (Standard and Professional) integration with Outlook, which will allow users to convert individual e-mails as well as folders of messages to a single PDF document, including the embedding of e-mail attachments. Users can then navigate between messages or search the messages using Acrobats search facility, she said.
"This is an easy way to integrate mail messages with other project files," Deziel said. The update also provides new organization tools to view and sort files and embedded documents.
Next Page: New Web capture feature.
Enterprise Applications 
