Adobe reinvents itself in order to thrive in new markets

Rethink IT, March, 2005 by Peter White

But the key challenge for 2005 will be making PDF into a general purpose container for all forms of enterprise document exchange and viewing--a move Quark has also tried in the past, with limited success.

New features are being added to this end, such as the Certified Document Service, which verifies the authenticity of documents saved in PDF format by adding digital signatures. Offered through online authentication specialist GeoTrust, this is a key part of the effort to expand PDF, addressing corporate interest in protecting against spoofed documents.

ATTRACTING INTEREST

This is attracting interest from heavy document users that are also security critical, such as banks and government agencies. To this end, Adobe is working on another security-related add-on for Acrobat, LiveCycle Policy Server, which will allow document creators to set restrictions on who can read a PDF file, for how long and other factors.

Based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), it also will work with Adobe's other PDF-based server products, including upcoming security and barcode reading extensions. Support for enterprise Java is another example of the barrage of changes that Adobe has made over the past nine months to make PDF into a technology to underpin the CIO's document strategies. "J2EE support will allow more IT administrators and developers to work with PDE Web services become a much more viable path for us," said Eugene Lee, head of marketing.

Web services, Java, federal class security--all these should be music to the CIO's ears. Whether Adobe can follow through with the features and quality that an enterprise class solution demands, and with the service and support that should accompany it, will remain to be seen in 2005.

ADOBE INTELLIGENT DOCUMENT PLATFORM

Adobe's Intelligent Document Platform enables government agencies and large companies to connect people and processes across an organization's extended enterprise of employees, customers and partners, inside and outside the firewall. Intelligent documents resemble their paper analogs in visual 'look and feel', but incorporate business logic and use XML for data integration to help drive business processes.

With the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform, complex documents can be integrated, and people inside and outside an enterprise can be integrated into business processes.

The enabling technologies for the platform are Adobe's document services, based on Acrobat, PDF and the Adobe Reader, which support document generation, collaboration and process management, regardless of user platform. Partnering with business infrastructure companies such as IBM and SAP, Adobe is working to extend the power of the document for enterprises.

SOME ADOBE FACTS

* More than 500m copies of Adobe Reader have been distributed worldwide

* PDF is the most popular document file format on the internet

* There are now more than 100,000 Adobe PostScript fonts

* PDF/A is a standard being established to set guidelines for archiving and preserving digital documents in the PDF format