Adobe Aims Acrobat 6.0 At General Business Users

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

Adobe is targeting 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 an icon on an Office menu bar.

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

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, among other things. Adobe is charging $99 for upgrades and $249 for new users.

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

Helandeer said with Acrobat 6.0, Adobe is also delivering better compression and enhanced metadata for retrieval and archival purposes. Having introduced server-based applications last October, Adobe has now positioned itself as a player in the general business-computing market.

"Adobe is serious about the enterprise market and is creating a compelling story," said Laurie Orlov, a Forester Research analyst.

In Adobe's vision, PDF files will be the center of document-centric business processes, providing a link between structure enterprise applications and unstructured processes based on desktop applications. But that also potentially pits Adobe against Microsoft, analysts say. Microsoft's next version of Office includes XML content, digital-rights and forms-processing features, addressing many of the same issues.

Jim Murphy, an analyst with AMR Research, said Microsoft isn't a threat to Adobe in the near term because Adobe has a long-standing product that is at the center of most digital-rights applications today. "I think people will feel more comfortable with Adobe," he said.

Moreover, Murphy said it will take some time for businesses to upgrade to Microsoft Office 2003. But he added that businesses would eventually migrate toward Microsoft's solution. "I don't think it's going to kill Adobe," he said. "I think it's going to limit the growth of Acrobat."

Orlov said, "Right now I would say they are complementary in the sense that Adobe incorporates Microsoft formats, and I don't believe Adobe is directly marketing to compete with Microsoft at this point. But you could argue that in a year or two, this [competition] will be more obvious."

Zone, a corporate reseller in Renton, Wash., is anticipating strong sales. "This is complementary in our minds to any Microsoft Office launch," said Brent Swank, director of software for Zone and its Mac Zone division. "When Office comes out, this is a natural add-on for us. We see it as an attached product for every Office sale."

Swank added that Zone, which has a catalog business as well as an outbound sales force, already relies heavily on Acrobat. "We make use of Acrobat daily here, and we understand the productivity behind it. We're sending out contracts, quotes--everything in our business surrounds a PDF workflow," he said.