Adobe Acrobat 7

By working with the presets in this manner, it's relatively straightforward to get up and running, but it's important to realise that Designer 7 isn't a simple utility - it's a full-blown and, at times, intimidating application. To make the most of it you'll have to learn how to build in intelligence to your forms to handle calculation and validation. Most importantly, you'll need to be able to bind form data to existing data sources. In particular, it's important to understand and work with XML, as this is how data is returned from the end-user's PDF -though Acrobat does at least offer the ability to collect returned data into a CSV-based spreadsheet. It's a lot to ask of the average user, but for enterprise-level work XML handling is ideal. Crucially, it means that the user-friendly PDF can act as the hub between relatively relaxed interaction with the end-user and highly structured back-office data handling.

It's here that Adobe's vision of the Intelligent Document Platform lies, but the efficient XML-based transfer and handling of end-user data is only half the story. To close the circle, you need to use Adobe's dedicated LiveCycle server solution. And again, XML proves central. To understand how, you have to realise that the Designer form is itself built on XML (that's why you need the PDF Preview pane). By saving the form template to Designer's native XDP format and posting this to the LiveCycle server, the form itself is rendered at runtime. This offers a number of advantages, such as the ability to render either to PDF or to HTML and to produce customised one-off PDF forms where the design updates dynamically to accommodate its data. Other elements of the LiveCycle solution include the ability to enable Reader users to save and digitally sign their forms, to store filled-in data as barcodes, to handle advanced security and review settings, and even to automate final archiving.

There's no doubt that Adobe's Intelligent Document Platform is a seriously impressive tool that builds on the ubiquity and familiarity of the free Reader 7 to connect people, paper, applications and data, both within and out of the office. For those organisations that depend heavily on paper handling - financial institutions, government agencies and so on - the potential boost to efficiency throughout the document workflow is enormous. But this needs to be kept in perspective. It's important to recognise that we're not talking about Adobe's original universal, peer-to-peer vision of the paperless office - this is a niche, server-based solution, aimed at only large paper-based organisations.

In many ways, Acrobat 7 and its integration of XML and PDF as 'intelligent documents' is a major, even seminal, release and one that will eventually affect us all as consumers. Certainly it's the Adobe Reader 7 users who will see the biggest difference in their Acrobat experience, moving beyond basic reading and printing to form-filling, digital signing, document review and so on. But what about the existing Acrobat creators? Here the situation is very different. Using Acrobat Professional, smaller workgroups can put their toe in the water with advanced forms-handling but, for most, the only appreciable benefit will boil down to the ability to include outside users in document reviews. For Acrobat 7 Standard and Elements users, the intelligent document revolution passes them by.

Ultimately, while Acrobat 7 opens up another important area and another major target audience, for most existing users it proves stronger on paper, as it were, than it does in practice.

Author: Tom Arah