INFO:
A lot has been happening for Adobe in relation to its Acrobat product line recently. To start with, in November Adobe released Version 8 of Acrobat Professional, Acrobat Standard, and the free Adobe Reader. New versions of the other Acrobat products, Acrobat Elements and Acrobat 3D, are expected to be released soon. At the same time, Adobe expanded the Acrobat family to include two new web conferencing and collaboration solutions, Acrobat Connect and Acrobat Connect Professional, which are based on the Breeze product that came with its acquisition of Macromedia in 2005.
Subsequently in January, Adobe and the Nemetschek Group—which was already in the limelight from its recent acquisition of Graphisoft—announced a strategic partnership that involves the integration of Adobe PDF creation capabilities directly into its various software applications. This integration has already been completed for AllPlan, is underway for VectorWorks (see the recent AECbytes Newsletter #29), and will likely be initiated for ArchiCAD once the Graphisoft acquisition has been completed. With Bentley already committed to the PDF file format for electronic publishing and collaboration (see AECbytes Newsletter #20 on the BE 2005 conference), that makes two of the top three AEC technology vendors solidly behind PDF, posing a significant challenge to Autodesk’s competing DWF format (see AECbytes Newsletter #24 on Autodesk University 2005).
And finally, Adobe just announced last week that it intends to release the full PDF specification to AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association, for the purpose of publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). While PDF has already become the de facto standard for document exchange, this move would make it a more formal and fully open standard and serve to further expand its use, cement its leading position for electronic publishing, and counteract a potential threat from Microsoft’s new XPS file format.
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