I was a virtual attendee at a demonstration of Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com focusing on the new collaboration and interactivity aspects led by Robert McDaniels. The session was hosted by the New Media Consortium, so it focused on educational uses of the products. The session was held on-line utilizing Adobe’s Acrobat Connect technology.
I left the demonstration being very impressed with Acrobat 9 and its connection to Acrobat.com. Acrobat.com is Adobe’s answer to the Google Apps/Microsoft Live Office/etc. office applications in the cloud concept. You get a document editor (BuzzWord), a meeting space through Connect and the ability to share documents with others. It is a smaller feature-set than some others, but probably hits most of what people really need. It is free to sign up for an account, and it comes with a sizable amount of storage space.
With version 8 Acrobat really started beefing up their collaboration features, and version 9 continues that improvement. You can distribute a PDF to a group for comments, have them make comments right on the document, and have those comments aggregated into one master document — doesn’t that sound useful? You need the full Acrobat Pro, but all they need is the free reader. Want to solict responses on a group of questions? Distribute them as a PDF form, your users fill them out and the answers get collected in a spreadsheet like report — and this can be exported and then opened locally in Excel. No longer do you need to collect and tabulate a group of email responses — pretty good huh? For me the killer new feature is the integrated video commenting. Make a PDF out of a flash video (FLV) file and send it out — again all people need is the Acrobat reader to view it as it now have the flash video player embedded. They insert comments right onto the video frame, and the time code is added to the comment text. In your master document these comments get aggregated in a master list — and to view the comment you click on it and the video jumps right to the spot in the film where the comment was made. Very cool!
In the real world I have found it a little tricky to get people used to utilizing the commenting tools. First this is a new way of submitting comments for most, so some un-learning, re-learning is needed. I also find the commenting tools a little tough to get used to initially, although you pick it up pretty quickly. It is probably best to start this as an initiative with a project team, class or other defined group and start off with a brief training/Q&A session.
My one criticism of the session was the Adobe Connect tool itself. This is the second time I’ve attended a Connect session led by an Adobe representative, and both times I’ve been less than impressed. This time I was on a wireless connection that felt a little sluggish (54mbps). I did set the connection speed to Modem, hoping it might help out. But I still experienced choppy audio which frequently dropped out. And at one point the audio was lagging almost a full minute behind the action on screen. And twice during the session the Adobe rep hit the wrong key on his computer and dropped himself out of the session. If he has trouble using it, how easy is it for a faculty member or student? The technology look promising, but so far I’m still not sure it is ready for prime time. But Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com certainly are worth a serious look.
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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