Review: Adobe Reinvents Digital Docs

Released in July in the midst of a significant upgrade by San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe throughout its Creative Suite lineup (which culminated with Creative Suite 4), Acrobat 9 Pro has swung to major advances in document management, document creation, efficiency and "wow" factor. The Test Center looked at Acrobat 9 Pro in the context of the broader Creative Suite 4 package but found enough new functionality to feel it deserves to be singled out in its own right. Acrobat 9 Pro might not push the industry into the paperless office realm all by itself, but it offers a host of new technology in a single application that will make paper documents much less competitive from a workflow, robustness and practicality standpoint.

Creative Suite 4, in its whole, is a massive bundle of just about everything in Adobe's tool chest—and an update from Creative Suite 3. Acrobat 9 Pro, while also a stand-alone product from Adobe, does benefit from integration with other elements of Creative Suite 4, including Flash Professional, Flash Encoder and the old reliable, Photoshop. That's because Adobe has built so much support from its multimedia arsenal into Acrobat 9 Pro that building PDFs is more than just a document-imaging exercise. It's document-architecture and construction rolled into one.

We loaded Acrobat Pro 9 onto a test PC with the rest of Creative Suite 4. It's a task that takes at least an hour, as we loaded each of the four disks onto the PC via Adobe's AIR-based installer. Adobe's installation process—as a company—is one of the few areas where a complaint could be made about its offering: When installing the more than a dozen applications that come with Creative Suite 4, you've got to install everything at once, or nothing at all. But installation, albeit slow, was easy and really the only area where we could kvetch.

It's easy to make good use of the new functionality added to Acrobat with 9 Pro. Converting clipboard data to a stand-alone PDF was a breeze. Clicking on a PowerPoint presentation, it's now possible to highlight two of, say, six elements on a slide and PDF those two elements onto their own document while ignoring the other four.

Acrobat 9 Pro also has a one-click Web capture into PDF (from browsers including Internet Explorer), which speeds up the process of saving Web-based documents in a workflow. For the employee whose daily life sits inside an application like Salesforce.com, it makes work that much more efficient and less time-consuming.

But the "wow" factor that Adobe has built into Acrobat 9 Pro comes from how much more valuable digital documents can now be built over their dead-tree, hard-copy rivals in the paper world. Adobe has now made it drag-and-drop simple to embed audio, video and a nice array of multimedia into PDFs; when the world now talks about "living, breathing documents," it might very well be a discussion of a PDF built into Acrobat 9 Pro.

In a matter of 10 minutes, with no training, it is possible to create a Flash-based video and import it anywhere into a PDF document with Creative Suite 4. So, for example, it's not only possible to create a PDF of testimony transcripts in a lawsuit before a judge, it's also possible to embed a video clip of that same testimony in the same document. And lawyers won't have to go back to night school to figure out how to do it.

As a stand-alone application, Adobe prices Acrobat 9 Pro at $449, or $159 for an upgrade from a previous version; if Creative Suite 3 is already paid for, it may make sense in some cases just to upgrade Acrobat. If purchased new, Creative Suite 4 is list-priced at $2,499; as an upgrade over Creative Suite 3, it's $899.

The Bottom Line Acrobat 9 Pro could possibly be the single, most powerful product that's ever been delivered in the world's efforts to take the office digital. As part of Creative Suite 4, it's a no-brainer for businesses that need to rewrite their rules of document management and, at the same time, gain competitive advantage. Creative Suite 4 is pricey—there's no getting around that—but its potential is staggering. The Test Center seldom gives five stars for technical merit to any product, but Acrobat 9 Pro is one that deserves it.