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Acrobat 8 presentation tour and User Group meeting

Tomorrow I'll be at the Adobe booth during the presentation of Acrobat 8 for the italian market.
I'll reply to Acrobat Connect's question and I'll show some Acrobat 8 new features.

In this occasion we'll have the third Acrobat User Group meeting.

So, if you'll be there you can find me on the Acrobat booth ! The first one who visit me we'll receive a free Acrobat The Bible book :)

Acrobat User Group community newsletter is out

The AUC newsletter is out with a ton of news.

They've  launched on AcrobatUsers.com an expanded capability for user-community members to get answers to Acrobat-related questions. The first version of the site's new "Ask an Expert" feature offers a way to submit a specific question that will be answered by one of a select group of expert users.
It' cool !

In this issue :
- Adobe interview: Heather Winkle
- Adobe Acrobat menu structure changes
- Five new ways to enhance your organization's workflow
- TIP: Creating and using security policies
- Download free Adobe Reader 8
- Blogging Acrobat 8

Adobe Reader 8 released for downloading

Adobe announced the Adobe Reader 8 :

Download free Adobe Reader 8 to more securely view, print, search, sign, and collaborate on PDF documents.

Adobe Reader 8 also features graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, which boosts performance when viewing graphics-intense PDF files, such as 3D content.

Read the reasons to upgrade to Adobe Reader 8

What's happened in the Acrobat User Community

Find out what's happened in the Acrobat User Community (AUC) during the last month. The November 2006 issue of AUC News, a free monthly newsletter, is now available at:

In this issue:
- Acrobat users showcase: Share your stories
- Adobe interview: Bob Wulff
- Creating Barcoded Forms with Acrobat 8
- Discount on Total Training for Acrobat 8 DVDs
- Acrobat Users Conference set for Washington, DC.
- Blogging Acrobat 8

Acrobat 8 Essential Training released by Lynda

Lynda.com has recently released the new Acrobat 8 Essential Training by Brian Wood (9.5 hours).
Acrobat 8 is a great release so if you want to know more don't miss this resource and don't forget to join the AcrobatUsers.com !

Acrobat 8 Essential Training provides a thorough explanation of each of this application's essential features. The training covers how to put together slick cross-platform presentations, assemble large media-rich projects for distribution, and create forms for data collection. It also teaches users how to edit, secure, and distribute PDFs. Instructor Brian Wood demonstrates how to create and modify PDFs, export images and text, create secure documents, and customize the Acrobat interface for productivity. Exercise files accompany the tutorials.

Topics include:

• Getting started with Acrobat
• Customizing tools
• Creating PDFs from various formats
• Modifying PDFs
• Extracting and replacing pages
• Creating and using bookmarks
• Exporting images and text
• Using collaboration tools
• Finding and searching
• Managing security policies

Learning more on Adobe LiveCycle

New articles have been published on the LiveCycle Developer Center :

Managing Adobe LiveCycle applications and control processing
Adobe (Oct. 5, 2006)
Learn these best practices for managing resource usage for LiveCycle applications.

Introduction to the OASIS SOA Reference Model
Duane Nickull (Oct. 5, 2006)
Look at the major SOA components from an industry and standards perspective and see how the SOA Reference Model fits in.

Breeze into new Acrobat 8 Product Line

The new Acrobat 8 family of products has been officially announced. You can find  more information about the release at Adobe Acrobat 8 product's page. 

Acrobat 8 new provides  a huge list of new features, but the biggest one is that all of the Acrobat 8 products, as well as Adobe Reader 8, provide one-button access to Adobe Acrobat Connect1 software, an easy-to-use, hosted software service that provides immediate access to a personal meeting room for real-time web conferencing.
Read the Adobe Expands Acrobat Family with New Acrobat Connect Product Line press release.

Acrobat Connect

Easy-to-use online personal meeting rooms to collaborate in real time for up to 15 participants.

Acrobat Connect Professional

Scalable, interactive web conferencing and multiple personal meeting rooms for everyone across the enterprise.

It's now time to join AcrobatUsers.com !

Save as PDF outside Microsoft Office

Via CNET News : Microsoft has released a free download that will enable Office 2007 users to save documents in both Adobe Systems's PDF format and Microsoft's own rival format, XPS.

The add-on works with the different planned versions of Office 2007, which is now in beta testing and expected to be made generally available by the end of the year.

The Save as PDF feature, announced last October, prompted Adobe to threaten to file an antitrust complaint against Microsoft in June.

In response, Microsoft changed its plans and decided to offer the feature as a separate download rather than included within Office 2007.

Microsoft executives have said that Save as PDF was one of the features most requested by its Office customers.

Getting started with Acrobat forms

AcrobatUsers.com, the Adobe Acrobat User Group site, publihsed the first in a series of related articles by PDF Conference founder Carl Young looks at some of the fundamental issues  in creating and using Acrobat forms:

Getting started with Acrobat forms

Acrobat August Newsletter by ArobatUsers.com

The August 2006 issue of Acrobat newsletter for the Acrobat user community was released and a there are a lot of news and articles on Acrobat :

Adobe interview: Ali Hanyaloglu
AcrobatUsers.com editor Kurt Foss talks with Ali Hanyaloglu, Technical Evangelist for Acrobat in Education at Adobe Systems, about his role as the company’s go-to guy for Acrobat in the educational market in North America.

Getting started with Acrobat forms
The first in a series of related articles by PDF Conference founder Carl Young looks at some of the fundamental issues – often overlooked – in creating and using Acrobat forms.

Acrobat 3D case study: Atrus
A new case study posted in the Acrobat 3D Corner explains and illustrates how Atrus, Inc. utilizes Acrobat 3D Capture to create 3D PDF files of contour plots for distribution to client engineering teams for electronic review and comment. Among other benefits, it replaces the need to send multiple 2D screenshots.

Acrobat and PDF overview
In this introduction to Acrobat, Ted Padova, author of the ‘Acrobat and PDF Bible’ series and numerous other books, offers his observations on how and why PDF has become a de facto standard for many industries such as creative professionals, architects, engineers, legal professionals, general office workers, IT, HR, marketing and more.

Maximizing PDF usability
Duff Johnson offers some guidelines for optimizing PDF files with usability in mind, including tips for designing new documents and improving others.

E-mail archiving with Acrobat
Donna Baker looks at how a small business can set up an e-mail archiving workflow using Acrobat and PDF to create a single, searchable and bookmarked file.