Tuesday, February 15, 2005
by Duff Johnson
Originally appeared in:
Introduction
One of the pioneers introducing PDF to the enterprise, Duff Johnson founded Document Solutions, Inc. in 1996 to leverage the power of the then-emerging PDF format in publishing and business communications. From MultiResolution processing to innovative content interfaces, Document Solutions, Inc. has developed scores of PDF technology solutions for publishing, manufacturing, service and government clients worldwide. A visionary promoter of the PDF format at seminars and trade-shows, Johnson now lends his expertise to Planet PDF as a Contributing Editor to advance understanding of the place, power and potential of electronic documents and the increasingly important role for PDF in the modern enterprise.
Going hand-in-hand with his role as an evangelist of PDF in the enterprise, Johnson is also inevitably become familiar with the intricacies of Accessibility and Section 508 compliance. So much so, in fact, that he has written a Learning Center on the topic, and helps clients achieve compliance and usability through his work with Document Solutions.
I recently caught up with him to ask about his first impressions of the Acrobat 7.0 product family, and his responses were interesting to say the least... The full interview text follows.
DAN SHEA, Planet PDF Associate Editor: In your opinion, what is the best thing about the new Acrobat 7.0 product family?
DUFF JOHNSON, Principal, Document Solutions, Inc.: The single best thing about the new Acrobat is the emergence of explicit links between server and desktop. By making users aware of the possibilities in Reader Extensions and of tools such as the Policy Server, Adobe may finally begin to access the enormous leveraging power implied by the ubiquity of Reader.
It's pretty obvious that Adobe has dramatically boosted the Acrobat/PDF development budget. I suspect that development resources are now commensurate with Acrobat's significance in terms of projected revenue growth for Adobe. Acrobat is now a truly vast program, less a toolbox and more of a colossal workshop.
SHEA: What are 2-3 cool features of the new releases (big or small)?
JOHNSON:
- Allowing Reader users to add comments is just the bomb. And it's just the beginning.
- The new Organizer is crude, but represents an interesting move. If this tool turns out to have any real-world appeal, watch for Adobe to further smooth PDF creation functions to really integrate the end-products of scanning, conversion from Word and PDFs created elsewhere. If Adobe could craft a simple yet effective electronic document creation-and-archive system in the next generation of Organizer, Acrobat would have a shot at the desktop document management (PaperPort et al.) market as well!
- Image-enhancement features alongside OCR, built right into the scanning interface. Hmm... ScanSoft, look out!
SHEA: With Acrobat 7.0 Professional, it will be possible to activate full commenting functionality for users of the free Reader on a per-document basis. This represents a major shift in Adobe's previous policy of not allowing changes to be saved in Reader. What impact do you think this will have on document review processes around the world?
JOHNSON: Successful near-term adoption of Acrobat's new commenting features will tend to be restricted to large corporate environments; organizations investing substantial internal or paid-for setup time and significant end-user training to establish an effective and realistic infrastructure for trusted document collaboration. One elephant in the living room is end-user facility with MS Word -- not really Adobe's problem, perhaps, but a key consideration in making a really tight comment and review system actually work. Everyone on the reviewing circuit needs to be deeply (and equally) comfortable with Word, and as knowledgeable and trusting of the Commenting environment as everyone else. Users will have to conform to new and precise conventions intricately woven into a well-considered workflow. This is not easy, nor, following a long tradition, has Adobe made it obvious.
In short, the system may seem to have a gentle learning curve, but will be intolerant of poor training or sloppy usage -- common qualities in the real world.
It's often forgotten that many senior document authors tend to regard this stuff as voodoo -- something that might sound neat in theory, but seems sufficiently technical that surely the IS department should deal with it... right? To the IS folks, sure, they can understand and implement the basics, and maybe even support it, but do they know what the document authors, reviewers and managers want to do with it?
Acrobat 7.0, while adding power features galore, is not a lens for thinking about document management. The documentation offers no real perspective on user needs, and predictably shies away from meaningful workflow recommendations. Any really substantive business use of these new features will require carefully architected, scripted and reality-tested workflows, developed by expensive and erratic IS consultants. Sound familiar? On the other hand, as with Microsoft's server-ware, there may be a real opportunity here for Application Service Providers to pick up Adobe's new power tools.
SHEA: Do you think the activation of commenting functionality is something that Adobe will make available to 3rd-parties -- in other words, do you think that developers will be permitted to enable the enhanced functionality with plug-ins or stand-alone applications?
JOHNSON: In strategic terms, the flip side of the coin that Adobe played when they allowed 3rd party developers to create PDF files was the knowledge that Adobe would retain ownership of Adobe Reader. Doubtless they'll thank you for asking, but unless the business terms are very favorable, I would expect to see Adobe restricting Reader Extensions activation to Adobe products for the time being, if not longer!
SHEA: OK, let's look at the other side: is there anything that you would like to have seen that's not in v7.0?
JOHNSON: I'd like to see 10% of the software development costs dedicated instead to developing full-featured by-the-numbers guides, assessment tools, recommendations, training scenarios, workflow task sets and other "demonstration" and teach-by-example assets. Another 10% of the budget should go to making sure these dialogs and messages are as intuitive, well-written and horizontally comprehensible as possible.
My advice to Adobe would be simple; focus at all times on helping the CFOs and CIOs understand exactly how high-level use of Acrobat and PDF will save them money -- and that includes being honest about what it will take to make this stuff really work.
SHEA: As with Acrobat 6.0, Adobe has added a significant amount of functionality for creative professionals and designers. For instance, key features that were previously the domain of such 3rd-party plug-ins as Enfocus PitStop Professional have now been added to the Pro version of Acrobat. How you think this and other changes will affect the PDF 3rd-party development "ecosystem" going forward?
JOHNSON: It's not clear that Adobe feels they really need the 3rd party plugin developer world; they pay it lip service at best. Success with PDF breeds 3rd party interest anyhow, so Adobe can take what they want and leave the rest. It should be abundantly clear by this point that Adobe has no fear of loading Acrobat Professional with the feature list equivalent of several kitchen sinks. The 3rd party world certainly has its uses for Adobe -- as low-cost arms-length R&D, if nothing else.
What does A7 mean for developers? I'd guess that there's a future in tailored middleware that builds on Adobe's core server offerings for implementation on corporate content systems and within ASP business models. PDF is now so powerful that it's a veritable "platform" in it's own right. Otherwise, the only part of the market Adobe doesn't seem to want for itself is the low-volume desktop PDF creation market - those unit prices have been deemed undesirable in San Jose.
SHEA: In forums and at conferences, one issue that just keeps coming up -- particularly since the release of v6.0 -- is the slow loading times of Acrobat. With the Acrobat 7.0 family, Adobe has tackled this head-on with the creation of a "speed launcher" for Windows users in addition to other tweaks for both Mac and Windows platforms. What do you think of the changes, and have you noticed any significant improvements in performance with v7.0?
JOHNSON: Yes, the launch time has been dramatically improved under Windows XP. Adding additional plugins slows down the startup, but the vast majority of Acrobat users won't need extra plugins now, will they?
At the same time as the launch and initial interface have been streamlined, the Acrobat 7.0 Pro interface is sliding stealthily towards the vertical-professional world exemplified by Photoshop. Crack open the deceptively simple menus and buttons, and you'll goggle at vast new landscapes of menus, buttons, tabs and dialogs. You can choose from 13 navigation tabs, 7 subject-oriented collections of menu items optimistically called Task Buttons and 17 possible Toolbars. Acrobat's Preferences dialog alone now includes 29 categories of Preferences, several with their own extensive submenus.
Among the legion of new menu items you'll find Acrobat 6's Review Tracker now renamed just Tracker, and is located on both the old View and the new Comments menus. Since their fancy new creations depend on adherence to strict workflows on a click-by-click basis, giving users two ways to identify with the Tracker seems almost... quaint. Perhaps (more likely) they simply lost touch with the old position of the Tracker (if you'll pardon the metaphor) in the blizzard of new menus, tools and dialogs. We'll likely never know.
SHEA: The entry-level license for Acrobat Elements has been reduced from 1,000 seats to 100 seats for version 7.0. What impact do you think this will have on the competitive landscape in the lower-end of PDF creation tools?
JOHNSON: I suspect that dropping the minimum Elements license from 1,000 to 100 seats is primarily a defensive move by Adobe, who have sensed that the prevailing laissez-faire attitude was going a bit too far in the lower end of the PDF creation arena. Aware that most people buy Acrobat simply to make PDFs, and watching 3rd parties step into PDF creation in a big way, Adobe concluded that adding pressure to this market-space would help push their competition towards the lower end of the business that Adobe would prefer not to service anyway.
Adobe wants IT purchasers to clearly understand that they can be "real" PDF people, just like the larger companies, or they can tinker with 3rd party desktop PDF creation meant for the hoi polloi. There's more than snobbery going on here. Adobe's real ace in the hole is Reader Extensions.
SHEA: Can you please give us a rundown of what's new, cool and perhaps not-so-cool about accessibility in Acrobat 7.0?
JOHNSON: There's lots of accessibility news in Acrobat 7.0
The uniquely difficult task that Adobe confronts with PDF accessibility revolves around reliably interpreting wildly unstructured content in such a way as to make it comprehensible and satisfactorily usable when "rendered" as XML or even simply as a stream of text. With this heavy burden in mind, Adobe has made some real progress in providing desktop tools to speed and smooth the process of making simpler PDF files truly accessible, and complex files within reach.
PDF Maker has been substantially upgraded, with better automatic structural tagging of simple and a credible attempt with even some complex documents, including far more reliable handling of links. Sadly, links made with PDF Maker still may target only the top of the target page. There's still no decent solution in PDF to get a JAWS user to land on some content in the middle of the page.
There are a lot of improvements to the MakeAccessible plugin, the "black-box" part of Adobe's accessibility effort, but the human touch is still most definitely required to assure meaningful accessibility with even slightly complex documents, sophisticated layouts, and anything containing graphics. What is more there's still no clear disclaimer from Adobe that the Accessibility Checker is NOT a Section 508 compliance checker, a still-common and still-woeful misunderstanding.
Although clunky, the new Touch-Up Reading Order Tool (TUROT) and associated Order panel are crucial additions to Acrobat from the Accessibility point of view. Without these types of tools, one could claim with some accuracy that accessible PDF would remain effectively oxymoronic, a parlor trick relegated to the wizards in the backroom and the most sophisticated publishers. There are real concerns with the TUROT; one has to use it carefully, and realize that careful workflow is the only way forward, especially with complex documents. Then there's the lack of an undo command... Sadly, Adobe's documentation on this tool is scant at best, and addresses few of the issues one routinely encounters on exactly the type of documents most likely to feel the TUROT's touch... newsletters, annual reports, and the like.
While it's got nothing to do with Acrobat 7.0 per se, the fact that JAWS, the de facto reference screen-reader software, still doesn't read Adobe's tags for tables in PDF remains a serious sour note. It is surely up to Freedom Scientific to address this deficit soon, and not risk becoming part of the problem. Some might laugh to think that Adobe might be trying, however hesitantly, to lead the way on accessibility. Notwithstanding the company's admittedly episodic interest in the subject, progress has clearly been made. It remains increasingly up to accessibility software developers to take the relatively small steps needed to properly integrate awareness of properly tagged PDF into their products.
SHEA: Adobe Acrobat 7.0 includes a greatly enhanced set of security features, including integration with Adobe Policy Server and the concept of eEnvelopes, which allows for the separate encryption of file attachments. What effect do you think this will have on the use of PDF as a "container" or delivery medium for sensitive content?
JOHNSON: As with many developments in Acrobat 7.0, Adobe's Policy Server and the eEnvelopes concept is a serious play for a mainstream role in electronic document technology for the 21st century. When imagined alongside and integrated with the enhanced Commenting capabilities in Acrobat, one sees the makings of a full-throated challenge to Microsoft's SharePoint, and the future of integrated business information.
Whether Adobe has decided to treat customers as solutions consumers rather than as shrink-wrap product consumers remains to be seen. If Adobe serverware tied very neatly into document creation, commenting and other native and Extended capabilities, it could really pull Adobe's product lines together, and create a juggernaut.
Adobe's logic is simple: if there's a big document-deployment or management need out there, they want to build the right workflow tools to drop on top of their PDF "platform". The reach of Reader gives them a tremendous advantage in cornering that business.
Adobe doubtless hopes that the LiveCycle Policy Server integration, arguably the stand-out new feature in 7.0, will become obvious to the very many organizations that might immediately appreciate the idea. Adobe has never before made a serious play for a leading-light role in the corporate server infrastructure. Shareholders will hope that Adobe's marketing will get that complex message out in a way that connects.
Historically, the fancier features in Acrobat have gone unnoticed by most users, who simply installed Acrobat so they could click the "Make PDF" button in Word. Adobe's success with Professional rests entirely on the core capabilities of Reader. Effective marketing of Acrobat's higher features to the C-level has eluded Adobe for years - that may now be changing.
It's the Digital Editions concept -- and the featured position it holds in Reader 7.0, that really caught my eye. With LiveCycle Policy Server, Adobe has created a new and powerful managed distribution option with tremendous potential for publishers -- and it's also a uniquely powerful business content management application. Impressive!
SHEA: So what is possible with Adobe Policy Server and Acrobat 7.0 that was not available or possible with previous versions of Acrobat? How much of the new security functionality is available WITHOUT Adobe Policy Server?
JOHNSON: Most of the features available with the Policy Server were available to various degrees with Acrobat 5.0 and Acrobat 6.0, via Adobe and 3rd party solutions but there was little effective integration with the desktop. With Acrobat 7.0, Adobe is really stepping out.
There are notable new security options even for those poor souls lacking their very own LiveCycle Policy Server.
- Using Password security, Acrobat Professional users can encrypt attachments rather than the PDF itself.
- Secure eEnvelopes are possible without the Policy Server.
- While Adobe has gone to some lengths to make the process of creating and exchanging certificates comprehensible, they remain a feature that average and even no-so-average users will toil over to set up correctly, to say nothing of efficiently. Certificates have not really changed, and don't allow for the expiration of documents -- a key feature for many prospective security applications.
PDF is still a young enough technology. In my utopia, the arrival of Reader Extensions would allow Adobe Systems to take a breath and focus in their next release less on raw features, but on really helping organizations access the power of PDF, even if it's with the Acrobat they've already got. Damn, wouldn't that be great?
SHEA: Thanks for your time, Duff.
Originally posted on planetpdf.com
