Monday, November 22, 2004

Acrobat 7 - built in heaven?

Lori DeFurio, Developer Evangelist from Adobe gave us a wonderful showing of all the new stuff coming with Acrobat 7. Here is the Adobe page that explains the day: This probably won’t stay live for too long

I was particulary impressed with the RSS feeds into Acrobat and the potential to give some extra Reader functionality through the ‘LiveCycle’ server. This is going to cost far too much though!

furthermore...

Ok so do we need this upgrade? We were told that many of the new features were comeing from requests by government agencies who need more security wrapped up in the PDF file. There is also a demand for more commenting and document editing, at a basic level, for users of the free Reader. This control can be given by full Acrobat authors but only through Adobe's 'LiveCycle' server. This server product is yet another that Adobe adds to its stable of server software for the control of electronic document delivery. Little mention was made of DRM and eBooks but instead we learnt of documents having 'policies' embedded to protect and limit access. Again these 'policies' can only be constructed through Adobe's new Policy server software. Prices for these products were not available at the presentations today. The Developer day was very good value (free!) and I learnt something of the future. Thanks Adobe!