Are You Ready to Upgrade to Adobe Acrobat XI?

Knowledge Workers and IT Pros Will Flip for It

Contributing Writer

With the use of mobile devices and cloud services growing rapidly, your users want the ability to work with documents anywhere, on any device, and your IT team needs to be able to support them effectively and efficiently, all the while keeping your organization’s data secure. IDC, on behalf of Adobe, conducted a global survey of the productivity challenges knowledge workers face and the opportunities for IT professional that support them have to address those issues. Read on to learn more about Adobe Acrobat XI can solve those challenges for your organization’s knowledge workers and IT teams.


Don’t Wait; Collaborate

Information workers can spend, on average, about half of their work week creating and managing documents. Unfortunately, however, half of that ends up being wasted on document-based challenges, such as recreating content that’s in existing PDF files instead of being able to reuse it or having to spend time searching for content contained in a bunch of different attachments in an email. Then, the other half of their work week is spent on collaboration – specifically around documents in this case. Half of that time can be lost to inefficiencies – having to chase down an approval or trying to find out if someone can give you feedback on the document before you hit the deadline.


Don’t Bend Over Backward

Acrobat XI now lets you edit, delete, and work with text and images on PDF documents directly in Acrobat without having to recreate anything. And if you ever need to do more you can always export that PDF file to Word or Excel. With Acrobat XI Pro , you can export that out to a fully editable Microsoft PowerPoint document that preserves all the objects as well. Then on the collaboration side, there’s new integration with Adobe online cloud services EchoSign and FormsCentral. The EchoSign online service not only lets you sign a document in PDF format, but also kicks off a process that will invite others to sign that document, no matter where they are, via the cloud, while providing you full insight into the signature process so you can see where things are and when they come back. It’s been proven way to really reduce the time it takes to get a signature on a document, which is really critical for things like sales and marketing where a signature on a contract is going to determine when you start getting revenue.

When you need to collect information from others, the new FormsCentral online service is invaluable. Anyone who has Acrobat XI and FormsCentral can now create Web and PDF forms, distribute them to others, and most importantly, get the information back from collaborators as quickly and easily as possible.


Keep Your Information in the Right Hands

Security, of course, is one of IT’s biggest concerns, but the fact remains that information is being leaked, whether knowingly or not, through documents. Acrobat XI has made it as easy as possible for knowledge workers of all experience levels to be able to secure documents correctly. In many cases, an organization’s security practices are IT-defined, so IT professionals can deploy settings, actions, or custom toolsets to allow users to prepare documents correctly and consistently according to corporate policies.

And IT is always thinking about their budget, so Adobe has made it as cost-effective as possible to deploy and manage Acrobat on user desktops. They’ve updated the free Adobe Customization Wizard, available for Mac and Windows, allowing IT professionals to easily preconfigure their Acrobat XI installation before deployment. Acrobat XI also supports the latest deployment mechanisms, such as Microsoft SCCM and Apple Remote Desktop, which lets IT ensure that the knowledge worker they support are securing documents consistently and correctly.


Next Steps

If you think your organization is ready to upgrade to Adobe Acrobat XI, a great place to start is IDC’s published whitepaper, which is available for free from the Adobe website. Also, download the trial version, available for both Mac and Windows, so knowledge works and IT professionals can see how Acrobat XI works for them. And for IT specifically, you can visit the Adobe Acrobat pages on the Adobe website for resources to help get you ready for configuring, deploying, and managing Acrobat XI.

For more information on what Adobe Acrobat XI can do for your organization, you can check out our Connection Point podcast, or give us a call at Connection.

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