Acrobat 8 incorporates Flash and Breeze, improves forms, and offers an improved redaction tool.Adobe announced Sept. 18 Acrobat 8, which will ship some time in November. A free trial download will be available
here when it ships, so early adopters wanting to test-drive the new version should keep their eye on that page.
Industry watchers keeping tabs on the San Jose, Calif., company will note that it took a few extra months to get this version out compared with previous versions.
Blame the lengthy development cycle on Adobe's merger with Macromedia; not only did that involve incorporating Macromedia technology such as Flash and Breeze into Acrobat and PDF, but also integrating Adobe's engineering and management staff.
New Web-Conferencing Tool
The most significant addition to Acrobat is direct hooks to Acrobat Connect, a Web-service version of the former Macromedia Breeze software (Acrobat Connect Pro is an upgrade to Breeze—more on that below). Almost as significant is new forms functionality that users have been demanding for several years, redaction tools, and a new way to bundle and send documents called a "PDF package."
Acrobat Connect adds live chat, a virtual whiteboard and other tools in a Flash-based Web conference, taking the collaborative efforts of PDF review and commenting and adding a live element. A "start meeting" button in Acrobat kicks off a conference, and the leader can send invites to meeting-goers via e-mail and instant messaging. Adobe hosts the conference, which can include up to 15 people, for a flat monthly ($39) or yearly rate ($395).
Connect Pro users pay a licensing fee depending on the size of the installation. It adds features like larger capacity for bigger groups, audience polling, customized layouts, voice interaction via VOIP (voice over IP) and multiple meeting rooms.
Forms Updated
Representing a shift in Adobe's thinking—and piecing off a key feature hitherto reserved for the $75,000 LiveCycle Reader Extensions server software—forms created in Acrobat 8 Pro can be filled out in Reader, which has been possible for years. The new part? People filling out those forms in Reader can save form data to their hard drives.
"The Reader Extensions features in Acrobat [8] are really geared at the individual in the workgroup," said Rick Brown, Adobe's director of product management. "It's all about scalability. The people using Reader Extensions Server, they're at large corporations, Reader-enabling thousands of documents at a time and distributing them to very large numbers of people. This is designed for someone like a small business holding a conference for a couple hundred of people."
Another feature in the Acrobat 8 Pro related to forms is "form field recognition," which takes a static PDF scanned file or layout and turns it into a live form. Acrobat Designer suggests where it thinks the document author intended form fields judging by its layout and offers suggestions for features such as fillable fields or radio buttons. Acrobat 8 Pro also adds new forms data-tracking features.
Wrap It Up
In the realm of secure document delivery, Acrobat 8 users can bundle and send documents in something Adobe calls a "PDF package," which works like ZIP folders, except they can be password-protected and encrypted with Acrobat's tools. Packages can contain basic PDFs, as well as native files from other applications and PDFs that previously had been signed.
The key advantage to putting a stack of documents in a PDF package as opposed to merging them all into one PDF, Brown said, is that the package retains digital signatures. Merging documents, he pointed out, creates a new PDF that invalidates digital signatures from previous editions. It also avails Acrobat's security and encryption features to non-PDFs, which users might need to send securely when they don't have other tools to accomplish that.
IT managers get finer control over enterprise deployments of Acrobat with a new Customization Wizard that supports standard tools such as IBM Tivoli, MS SMS, MS Group Policy Objects and Active Directory. The software allows one person to turn off everyone's automatic updates, set security settings and register serial numbers.
Black It Out
Also new to Acrobat 8 is a redaction tool, which Brown said the company added because of recent high-profile—and publicly embarrassing—slip-ups in both the legal and governmental arenas where authorities thought they were blacking out text in sensitive documents but instead were basically drawing black boxes over live text that remained accessible to journalists and bloggers.
These problems weren't all Acrobat-specific; they extended beyond PDFs into documents native to other applications. The new Acrobat redaction tools not only black out text, but permanently remove the underlying text. They also search areas of the document that might not be easily viewable, such as metadata, headers and footers.
Other features and upgrades of note: sped-up conversion of large documents from programs such as Visio and AutoCAD to PDF, layers intact; Lotus e-mail conversion to PDF; creation and validation of PDF/X documents for printing and PDF/A documents, an archiving standard some government and corporate IT departments require; a new Office-like "Getting Started" menu to help the average person cut through the many Acrobat features and find the ones they're looking for when working with a document; and "shared reviews," which makes review-and-commenting processes (and tracking them) closer to real time whether they're deployed via file server, Web server, network directory, Microsoft SharePoint workspace or WebDAV server.
Except for the addition of Acrobat Connect, the product line remains the same in Version 8, as well as the pricing (Acrobat 3D, $995; Pro, $449; Standard, $299; Elements, licensing begins at 100 seats; Reader, as always, is free for downloading).
Graphics Tools 
