Today we began shipping our newest and most powerful collaboration solution – Adobe Acrobat XI® with cloud services – and you can get it now at the Adobe store or your nearest Adobe reseller.

Adobe Acrobat XI has the capabilities to let you handle the most complex document challenges and help your IT department close the gap on the productivity inefficiencies that result from working with an ever-increasing number of documents. But more than that, Acrobat XI gives you easy access to our powerful cloud services for web contracting and online forms that will make doing business from anywhere a breeze.

Acrobat XI has the features you asked for and then some.  Features like making it easier than ever to edit PDF files and export to Microsoft PowerPoint; touch-friendly capabilities on tablets, and ensuring interoperability with Windows 7 and 8. Acrobat XI also lets you update text directly in PDF, automatically wrap paragraph text, search and replace words in a PDF file, and crop, adjust, or replace images, with the newly designed Edit Text and Images tool.

Customers tell us these features save hours of work.

“Using Acrobat XI, our marketing team can easily edit and fine‐tune text, images, and rich‐media content directly within a PDF presentation whenever and wherever they are, saving valuable time and costs of reworking materials,” said Jim Confalone, founder of ProPoint Graphics.

Better integration with our cloud services, Adobe EchoSign and FormsCentral, has also topped customer request lists, and with Acrobat XI, we made that possible. Using Adobe EchoSign, sales teams can now cut contract cycles and the time to close a deal from weeks to just hours. Think of what that means to your bottom line.  Bill Lunsford, graphics manager, BBDO Atlanta likes how it makes his day easier. “The new EchoSign features within Adobe Acrobat XI will streamline everyday tasks. These days, no one is going to stand at a fax machine to wait for approvals. Being able to electronically sign a PDF on cost estimates for a project will accelerate go‐to‐market schedules,” he said.

With Adobe FormsCentral, you get robust forms creation, data collection, and results analysis that customers are raving about. “The enhancements to FormsCentral within Acrobat XI make creating and distributing well-designed, interactive forms to exchanging information with clients and partners much easier,” said Bart van Wanroij, president of Microsoft software developer, Epona. “We especially love the new graphic representation of the form results summary in Acrobat XI. With FormsCentral capabilities in Acrobat XI, the road to collecting, analyzing, and ultimately reporting on data just became a lot shorter for Epona!”

We also made both Acrobat XI and the new Adobe Reader® XI touch enabled for use on tablet devices.  Now PDF files containing dynamic media content, as well as files in shared review and electronic signature workflows, can be managed from virtually anywhere. With the Reader XI for mobile app, iOS, Android™, and Windows 8 users can collaborate in ways not possible before — adding comments during review cycles, fully interacting with PDF and web forms, and participating in electronic signature workflows. Additionally, IT can now deliver Reader XI or Acrobat XI as a centrally-managed, touch-friendly, virtual application with improved support for Citrix.

Mike Mann, release and deployment analyst, at McGladrey, thinks the new touch-enabled Reader makes McGladrey staff more efficient. “Our employees use tablets to get work done on the go. With the new editing features supported in Adobe Reader for mobile devices, our employees will be able to review PDF files and make notes at any time, increasing productivity and encouraging adoption of mobile technology,” he said.

IT professionals are praising Acrobat XI for its tighter SharePoint and Office integration. “The integration of Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft SharePoint is greatly improving how the Juvenile Justice Partners manage, share, and publish juvenile case information,” said Susan Green, assistant CIO, at the San Diego County District Attorney’s office.

Acrobat XI also streamlines deployment and maintenance, which Rob Brawn, director for the Center of Project Excellence, CH2M Hill, thinks is a huge time saver. “It is a full time job to manage software updates and keep users current on software versions. Acrobat XI security enhancements minimize out‐of‐cycle patches, saving time for IT and the users,” he said. Acrobat XI also provides industry-leading security features and supports application virtualization via Citrix XenApp software to provide a low cost of ownership and sound return on investment.

If greater productivity, efficiency and better ROI top your list of goals for your organization, give Acrobat XI a look with a free 30-day trial for Windows or Mac. If you already know the benefits Acrobat brings to a business, and you’re ready “to go to 11,” upgrading is easy and starts at just $199 for Acrobat XI Pro. So what are you waiting for?

Mark Grilli, senior director of product marketing, Acrobat Solutions

Important P.S. for LiveCycle Designer Users!

You’ve probably already heard that LiveCycle Designer will no longer be shipping with Acrobat XI. But don’t panic. For those of you who have been using LiveCycle Designer with Acrobat 8*, Acrobat 9 or Acrobat X and want to upgrade to the latest and greatest, we’re offering a free version of LiveCycle once you upgrade to Acrobat XI, just so you can keep on using the programs you’re used to working with. Just get in touch with us and let us know that you’ve upgraded to Acrobat XI. Our customer service representatives will be happy to provide you with the latest version of LiveCycle Designer so you can continue to get your work done as usual with Acrobat XI.

You’re the one in your workgroup that starts all the trends: first, you introduced everyone to the yoga place down the street from the office; now a whole gaggle of your colleagues goes every day during the lunch hour. Then, you put your desk on blocks so you could stand instead of sit at your computer; now all the desks on your floor are adjustable.

Finally, you started using Adobe FormsCentral to create and share your online and PDF forms – and before you knew it, so was everyone else.

We’ve been hearing lots of stories just like this one, and so we’ve decided that we should make it easier and more affordable for you and your whole team to use FormsCentral.

Starting now, you can purchase FormsCentral subscriptions at a discounted rate if you purchase subscriptions for the whole team. Go ahead and set the trend!

For more on available bundles, pricing and info, check out the FormsCentral Team Subscription, here.

- Rebecca Staley, Marketing Specialist, Acrobat Solutions

IDC recently undertook a large global survey of information workers and IT professionals on behalf of Adobe to better understand the productivity challenges that cost information workers time, and put a dollar value on that unproductive time. The bottom line: conservatively, the cost to an organization of 1,000 employees is nearly $16m a year.

This is a huge cost, but it’s also a tremendous opportunity. As our research shows, time wasted on unproductive tasks adds up to a 21.3% hit on the organization’s overall productivity. Addressing the time wasters would be equivalent to adding 213 employees in a 1,000 person organization – employees who could be out selling and supporting customers, designing and building new products, innovating and driving the business forward.

We’ve seen plenty of investment in business process improvement over the past few years, but most of these efforts are aimed at re-engineering or automating business processes that are system-to-system, or system-to-human. Our research findings on information worker productivity suggest that organizations need to place similar emphasis on improving individual productivity and human-to-human business processes.

There’s some evidence that executives in many organizations are recognizing the importance of information worker productivity. IDC’s CIO survey research shows productivity is a top priority this year. But where to start?

A surprising finding in our survey is that information workers spend a very large percentage of their time working with documents in one way or another – researching and gathering information for documents, creating, merging edits and comments from multiple reviewers into a single revision, managing the document approval process and obtaining approvals and signatures, and dealing with forms and forms data. As it turns out, quite a bit of this time is spent dealing with a variety of frustrations and challenges. It’s no one single thing – it’s a whole slew of time wasters that fall broadly under personal productivity and collaboration.

We think the challenges working with documents are only increasing as employees increasingly work on the go using smartphones and tablets in addition to their PCs, and collaborate with people outside the organization. And not just for information workers: the growing needs around mobility and external collaboration are also creating new challenges for IT around security and risk management, so we believe the time is now to address document-based productivity issues.

Does your organization have a program underway to improve information worker productivity? If so, what steps are you taking? If not, what’s holding you back?

Read more in the full IDC white paper, here.

Melissa Webster, program vice president, IDC

Follow Melissa Webster on Twitter: mwebster_idc

In conjunction with this week’s announcement of Adobe Acrobat XI, we asked IDC’s Melissa Webster to take a closer look at the document-based challenges information workers and IT professionals face on a daily basis. The research resulted in a global IDC white paper that examined how productivity, collaboration, device and security issues have a significant impact on organizations. We’re calling this the “Document Productivity Gap.” The infographic below illustrates the top findings in the white paper.

Acrobat addresses the problems that compromise the productivity of information workers and IT departments.  As CMSWire’s David Roe wrote this week, “The features have been built around actual enterprise needs.” Reporters from InformationWeek, eWeek, TechCrunch and PC World and more also reported on the white paper this week.

You can read the report in full here.

October 1 marks a major milestone for the Adobe Acrobat business. We’re launching Adobe Acrobat XI. Acrobat XI software with cloud services is a powerful new solution that rises to today’s complex document challenges for creating, consuming, sharing and securing PDF content across devices and platforms.

We’ve added several much-asked-for features that are aimed at making life easier for information workers like you. Acrobat XI features complete PDF editing and export to PowerPoint; touch-friendly capabilities on tablets; sophisticated web contracting with Adobe EchoSign; and forms creation, data collection and analysis with Adobe FormsCentral.

We’ve added features IT people have asked for, too:  seamless Microsoft Office and SharePoint integration, easy deployment, applications virtualization and robust application security to provide a low cost of ownership and sound return on investment.

The new Acrobat XI family includes Acrobat XI, Adobe Reader XI and newly integrated document services, Adobe FormsCentral and Adobe EchoSign.

It’s About Productivity

The explosion of digital documents in the workplace has created new challenges for productivity.  With Acrobat XI we’re taking on the issues that are dragging down individual and organizational productivity.

Each week, individual information workers spend half their time searching, filing, organizing, merging and editing comments, obtaining signatures, reviewing feedback and consolidating data, or collaborating with people outside their organizations. IT departments struggle with integrating and managing a diversity of platforms, devices and services, while trying to protect sensitive corporate IP and personal information.

Information workers are asking:  “How do I do what I was doing before, but work in this new environment?”

And organizations of all types are faced with adapting to this complexity, while driving their businesses forward, wondering: “How do I accelerate revenue, secure my IP and continue to evolve my workers capabilities to meet these new challenges?”

These productivity, collaboration, device and security issues have a significant impact on organizations. We’re calling this the Document Productivity Gap. The key to closing the gap is to recognize  that it is a set of compounding issues, multiple, little things that add up to have a big impact.

We asked IDC to take a closer look at these inefficiencies and the impact document-based challenges have on information workers and IT professionals.  One finding startled me. According to a recent global IDC white paper, sponsored by Adobe, the addressable impact of these inefficiencies on an organization of 1,000 employees is almost $16 million annually.  And those are the addressable gaps – not theoretical nirvana that is impossible to reach, but very realistic, tangible gaps that can be closed today. For example, if we could bridge the gap we could add 21.3 percent to an organization’s resources – or the equivalent of 213 employees for every 1,000 people at an organization.  Even if we recover just half of this productivity loss, it could equal hiring close to 100 new employees for a 1,000 person organization.  Imagine the impact of 100 new engineers, salespeople, marketers or IT professionals?

What “11” Means: Customers Weigh In

With the new release, we have made significant innovations across the desktop and the cloud to address the gap.  We wanted to:

• Enable information workers to unlock PDF content with comprehensive tools for both editing and content reuse.
• Accelerate document exchange using PDF and the web, forms data collection, review, approvals and eSignatures.
• Empower employees to be productive on the go with PDF on tablets and smartphones.
• Mitigate risk and lower IT costs with the most advanced document and application security.

It looks like we’ve succeeded. Acrobat XI has gotten high marks from customers that were in our beta program. These customers are typical of those dealing with the gap.

Security is high on the list for many. Mike Mann, release and deployment analyst at tax and finance consultancy, McGladrey, said, “Our client information is sensitive, so document security is critical. Acrobat XI offers advance document protection capabilities that are easier than ever for our staff to uniformly secure documents.”

Bill Lunsford of BBDO Atlanta likes the speed and efficiency he gets with the integrated services, especially EchoSign. “The new EchoSign features within Adobe Acrobat XI will streamline everyday tasks. These days, no one is going to stand at a fax machine to wait for approvals. Being able to electronically sign a PDF on cost estimates for a project will accelerate go-to-market schedules.”

Yvonne Willis, enterprise applications and project manager at Pillsbury Law, echoed that: “Security is the talk of the town. All of our clients expect the highest level of security, from our documents through our applications and IT environment. Acrobat XI provides key security enhancements that support both users and IT professionals.”

Regarding accelerating document exchange, Saul Morse, vice president of multichannel integration, Palio, said, “Acrobat XI now makes it even easier and faster to create PDF forms and to automatically distribute and collect information with new online forms services available within Acrobat XI.”

But BBDO Atlanta’s Lunsford summed up Acrobat XI best: “I leverage the heck out of Adobe Acrobat because I can cut down on the resources and my IT department loves me.”

Today is October 1. Mark it down as the day we close the gap.

Kevin M. Lynch, SVP and GM of Acrobat and Document Services, Adobe

Follow Kevin on Twitter: @LynchKevinM

In my talks with Adobe EchoSign customers, I hear first hand how our web contracting and eSignature solution is changing the game. Just like video conferencing’s infiltration into business years ago, signing and managing contracts online is becoming second nature to business processes and companies are realizing the benefits.

I’ll be moderating a panel at Salesforce Dreamforce this year titled “Its 2012, Shouldn’t You be Contracting Like it Is?” Experts from Groupon, Electronic Arts, SolarCity and Time Warner Cable will share lessons learned and best practices around web contracting, how their companies have increased ROI in Salesforce and turned their businesses into competitive sales machines using Adobe EchoSign.  Here are the details:

Session: “Its 2012, Shouldn’t You be Contracting Like it Is?”

Date/Time: September 18 from 12:30pm – 1:30pm.

Venue: San Francisco Marriott Marquis

Room: Golden Gate A

Panelists: Groupon, Electronic Arts, Solar City and Time Warner Cable

For more updates on EchoSign at Dreamforce 2012, keep an eye on our blog and the Acrobat, EchoSign and Chatter Twitter handles (#df12).

We’ve entered into a new age of doing business in the cloud and web contracting is playing an important role in accelerating this transformation.

Kevin M. Lynch, SVP and GM, Acrobat and Document Services, Adobe

Twitter: @LynchKevinM