Adobe To Give Enterprise Plans A Boost With New Acrobat Offerings

To avoid confusion with its new Acrobat product line, the company is also renaming its ubiquitous, free application for reading PDF documents Adobe Reader.

Adobe is intending a stripped-down edition of Acrobat, called Acrobat 6.0 Elements, for wide deployment on enterprise desktops. The product is being priced at $29 per seat for a minimum of 1,000 seats and will give users the ability to turn Microsoft Office documents into PDF files by clicking on an Office menu-bar icon, the company said.

"Acrobat Elements is specifically enabling PDF creation across the enterprise," said Diana Helandeer, senior product marketing manager at Adobe, based here. "This is something our customers have validated for us time and time again."

A second edition, Acrobat 6.0 Standard, is also targeted at business professionals but includes enhanced features for creating, reviewing and exchanging PDF files for unstructured workflow-type uses. The edition includes security features such as encryption, password protection and digital signatures; provides tools for marking up and annotating documents to aid collaborative review processes; and can be used to capture Web pages and entire sites in PDF form for offline review or archiving. Adobe is charging $99 for upgrades and $249 for new users.

The Acrobat Professional edition will be aimed at engineering, graphic arts and advanced business uses. It can create Adobe PDF forms, handle color separations and other prepress functions, and convert documents to PDF format from specialized applications such as Autodesk, AutoCAD, Visio and Microsoft Project. The upgrade price is $149 and the new-user price is $449.

Having introduced server-based applications last October, Adobe has positioned itself as a player in the general business-computing market, said industry analysts.

Meanwhile, some solution providers said they are eagerly anticipating Adobe's new releases. "This is complementary to any Microsoft Office launch," said Brent Swank, director of software and the Mac division at Zone, a corporate reseller based in Renton, Wash. "When Office comes out, this is a natural add-on for us. We see it as an attached product for every Office sale."