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Adobe today unveiled Acrobat XI, the latest version of its PDF authoring platform that now integrates with a series of cloud services designed to ease and help automate document flow for the enterprise. In its 11th major iteration, Acrobat now fully integrates with Microsoft Office and SharePoint, and it includes interface enhancements developed specifically to simplify its use on tablets. General availability is expected to be around Nov. 1.
Designed to simplify the process of circulating forms in need of multiple approvals, a new service called FormsCentral provides a central Web-based repository for an organization's forms and an automated process for distributing them to stakeholders, regardless of where they might be located. "Forms look the same regardless of device or browser," said Mark Grilli, Adobe's senior director of product marketing for Acrobat Solutions, at a confidential pre-launch press briefing. "The form can be designed to display only the fields that are needed," with more fields added dynamically depending on the selected parent fields, he said while demonstrating the new cloud service.
[Related: The Daily App: Adobe Connect Mobile For Android, BlackBerry, iOS]
For $14.99 per month, the service will give any device with the Acrobat Reader app access to cloud-based forms to add and highlight text, sign off and forward via email to the next person in the list. "You can control who signs what, when and in what order," said Grilli of the service. Signatures can either be captured as a finger scribble or as a handwritten font, he said. And if the signer is logged into his EchoSign account, then any account-specific fields such as name and title are automatically populated.
With Acrobat XI, Adobe has now fully integrated the features of EchoSign, the electronic signature service it acquired last year. Also priced at just under $15 per month, the service provides a central repository for all of an organization's signed contracts and other documents for easy access and retrieval. "This eliminates the problem of having contracts scattered throughout a building or across many buildings," said Grilli. EchoSign also allows document signing from within Salesforce, and it can optionally use Salesforce as an additional repository.
