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As well as the updated Acrobat 8 bringing the creation and management of PDF files to the CS party, the Premium version of the suite will now also bundle Dreamweaver 8, Adobe's Web design and development tool, which it acquired with its purchase of Macromedia last year.

Note that future versions of Adobe Creative Suite will integrate Dreamweaver as a replacement for Adobe GoLive. However, Adobe says it will continue to develop GoLive as a standalone product.

'Acrobat 8 Professional enables printers to achieve better quality while automating workflows and controlling costs, and together with the recently released Adobe PDF Print Engine delivers the first end-to-end native PDF workflow,' said Mark Hilton, VP of product management. 'In addition, we decided

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it was the right time to deliver Dreamweaver with Creative Suite 2.3, so customers can make the transition to the industry's leading Web design and development tool.'

Version 8 of Acrobat sees all its constituent products getting one-button access to the company's new Acrobat Connect software, the hosted software service for real-time web conferencing. There is also improved support for group access to electronic documents over the web. For example, a participant in a shared review of a document can see comments posted by others, track the status of the review, and work on the document even when not connected.

Note that both Acrobat 8 Professional and Acrobat Connect will be available in November.

'With Acrobat 8, Adobe is enabling knowledge workers to use next generation electronic documents to easily collaborate with people, ideas and information, regardless of all-too-common operating system or platform constraints,' said Tom Hale, senior VP, Knowledge Worker Business Unit, Adobe. 'With the addition of Acrobat Connect, they can take collaboration a step further to instantly and easily connect with each other in real-time over the web.'

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional is priced at £440.62 (£158.62 for upgrades) and Creative Suite 2.3 Premium is £1,082.95 (£163.35 for upgrades). They run on both Windows and Mac platforms.