Take up the challenge – Acrobat 9

Adobe today officially announced their new Acrobat 9 range of products, off the shelf are rolling: Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, Acrobat 9 Pro, Acrobat 9 Standard and a new Adobe Reader.

Time for organisations to take up the challenge and use Acrobat to its full advantage.  In all honesty what I see in this release is the ability for organisations to take their document workflows a step further, to review their paper based workflows once again, and finally take the plunge into the world of PDF and online collaboration and communication if they’ve not yet done so…

Some significant new features I’ve spotted include:

• The application launch time is heaps faster, according to Adobe 2 to 3 times
• PDF Portfolios: A build on the previous PDF Package, utitlising Flash technology to create very nicely animated collections of many file types in a single container.  A great new tool to present to your clients their new corporate look or a series of designs. Or if you’re not working in the design world, to share your ideas and document collections in a nice and appealling manner.
• Built in ability to share and store documents across the net using Adobe.com for small groups. Super cool. You want to show your partner in another state or country a development plan you’re working on? flick through the page together 🙂 Collaboration becomes even easier.
• Adobe Presenter is now built-in, as is native support for Flash
• PDF Compare, the functionality that compares two PDF files, identifies all differences between text,images pages etc, and marks these for you. This is an amazingly visual tool. Great to use when you’ve had to make some last minute changes to documents and want to compare finished PDF output with a previous version to ensure you’ve taken note of all of the changes that needed to be made 🙂 (just an idea…)
• Native Acrobat 9 form functionality is further enhanced, much more visual and easier to use. Click and drag fields in their structure to the correct tab order, make changes to field names etc. All without the need to open a dialog box.
• There are further improvements to the Print Production Tools, for instance you can now set the sample size in Output preview, and view particular object types and even view settings for an individually selected object type.

Ok, I know I sound like a marketing person for Adobe, but honestly, this is a very smooth product and each enhancement really is an enhancement in my opinion.

Flavours

The following flavours will be available for various OS platforms:

• Acrobat Pro Extended – Windows Only
• Acrobat Pro – Windows and Mac
• Acrobat Standard – Windows Only
• Adobe Reader – Windows, Mac, Linux and more…

For a full-features comparison chart review the Product Comparison chart on the Adobe site.

Licensing

Ooooh, and what if you’ve got licenses for the Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium or Standard Edition? Can you upgrade? what will you get. Upgrading to Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Master Collection, Design Premium or Standard Edition, includes the upgrade from Acrobat 8 Professional to Acrobat 9 Pro. And if you’re a Design Premium upgrader, the upgrade includes Fireworks CS3.

Web-reference: Acrobat Product Family (2008, Adobe Systems)
Web-reference: Product Comparison (2008, Adobe Systems)