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Acrobat 8 and the Extended Rights Manifesto
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Wednesday, November 8, 2006
by Duff Johnson
The single most important feature of Acrobat Professional 8 is a dramatic expansion in the Reader Extensions that Acrobat Professional may apply to PDF files, bestowing new "Extended Rights". Of these, the most important such "Right" is commonly known as "Reader Save". Within the new End User License Agreement (EULA) and certain other technical limitations, Acrobat Professional 8 obviates the need for expensive servers, programmatic chicanery or 3rd party products to deploy this key feature for end-users.
Simply put, Reader Save allows an Acrobat Pro user to "bless" a PDF such that form-fields may be completed and then saved by any user with the free Adobe Reader. This facility is a desirable quality for almost any fillable form, and in many cases, it is simply essential in many of the form workflows actually operating in the real world.
Before Acrobat 8, the only way to get this feature into a PDF was via Adobe's Reader Extensions Server (ARES), five-figure "enterprise" software sold exclusively through Adobe's direct-sales bureaucracy. ARES remains a product in Adobe's LiveCycle lineup - more on that later.
In July, 2006, I introduced the Extended Rights Manifesto; essentially, a set of checkpoints for assessing the implementation of Reader Extensions in Adobe's PDF management software. The idea was to offer encouragement and guidance to Adobe Systems as they pondered their strategy for moving Reader Extensions to Acrobat Professional.
In forthcoming posts, I'm going to go through the Articles of the Manifesto one by one, and "score" Adobe on the new playing field they've created with Acrobat 8. At the same time, we'll doubtless think of some revisions to the Manifesto, in fact, we'll need a whole NEW Manifesto just to keep up. Stay tuned! Along the way, please feel free to let me know YOUR thoughts on Extended Rights as well!
Originally posted on Duff Johnson's PDF Perspective blog for acrobatusers.com.
