PDF Document Management Software, Services & Support

Acrobat 8 Meets the Extended Rights Manifesto

Friday, November 10, 2006

by Duff Johnson

This post is part of a series based on the "Extended Rights Manifesto".

Changes in Acrobat 8

Acrobat 8 Professional now offers three ways to "bless" a PDF with Extended Rights ("Reader-Enable"):

1. From the Advanced menu, simply select "Enable Usage Rights in Adobe Reader" to bless your PDF with Forms Save, Commenting and Digital Signatures rights. Forms-data import and export rights are also enabled (although undocumented). However, the right to spawn new pages from templates in Reader is unavailable in Acrobat 8 Professional, as is SOAP, or the capacity to bless more than one file at a time. See this post on Thom's blog and this article by Ted Padova for more specifics.
2.  "Distribute form", available on the Forms menu or task button is a simple wizard that adds Extended Rights within a canned distribution model based on your email client.
3. "Send for Email Review" from the Comments menu or Review & Comment task button calls a wizard which adds Extended Rights for commenting only, disabling any Extended Rights.

Comment

First and foremost, Adobe deserves a lot of praise for taking the risk of moving formerly hyper-expensive "enterprise" functionality right into the desktop mainstream at a "mere" $449 a pop. What's the catch, right? And for that matter, what's the point of Adobe's LiveCycle Reader Extensions Server now?

The "value add" of the Reader Extensions Server has been amended to:

1. Enabling the right of PDF files open in Reader to spawn new pages (as may be called for in on-board javascript)
2. Enabling SOAP rights (connecting PDFs to live content delivered by a webserver)
3. "Blessing" PDFs via the Batch Processor
4. And of course, everyone's favorite: "because the End User License Agreement (EULA) Says So".

Now... I'm not actually having much luck actually FINDING the EULA text anywhere in the Acrobat documentation post-installation, nor is it up on adobe.com as of this post. So the only chance you have to read it in the short-term is if you pay attention during the customary "click though" moment on installation when you are asked to accept a software license. This time, don't just click though, as I did.

In any event. If memory serves, the EULA limits users to either 500 end-users per form, with unlimited "instances" of the forms for each user.... or else distribution to an unknown number of users (ie, posting on a website) with a limit of 500 form-instances collected. How you figure out when you hit these limits is (it seems) up to you.

(...)

You might very well think that, but I couldn't possibly comment.

The Manifesto Score Card, Article 1

November, 2006, Acrobat Professional 8.0: 8 out of 10.

The lack of the template spawning and SOAP "rights" is a real shame, and it should be possible to batch enable forms. There's something wrong with the business model when people aren't being encouraged to use this extraordinary functionality as much as possible. We also need more control over the messages displayed (or not) to the user when they open PDFs with Extended Rights, but these are whines about the way Rights are handled, not the Rights themselves. Even the LiveCycle server product doesn't include (via the UI, anyhow) enough "controls" over the way Extended Rights actually manifest in PDF.

(An aside, I recently needed Extended Rights on a "kiosk" type project... not to actually allow Reader to Save, but simply to stop the !*&!@#$% warning message about how Reader "couldn't save this form" from appearing everytime users touched a form-field!)

I also have a caveat on the EULA. Adobe's real intent is clearly (a) lax and (b) TBD, but what bothers me more is that the idea seems kind of goofy; a barrier to business at best, a missed opportunity on the revenue side (tsk, tsk) at worst.

But that's for another post.

Nonetheless, the simple fact is that allowing Acrobat 8 Professional to "bless" a PDF, any PDF, with most available Extended Rights, is a marvellous thing. Whole workflows can now blossom in PDF. It's a $449 bargain based on this feature alone. Reader can Save! If you've bothered to read this far, you know what that means.

More Articles to follow over the next few months.

Originally posted on Duff Johnson's PDF Perspective blog for acrobatusers.com.