Adobe targets document management market

With Acrobat 6, Adobe is moving beyond pre-press. The document management market in India is just starting to take off and Adobe is in the right place at the right time with a credible solution, says Prashant L Rao

Acrobat 6 can pull data out of a SAP database to create a read-only PDF, letting enterprises share crucial information without having to worry that it will be tampered with en route, says Sandeep Mehrotra

The Indian document management market is estimated to be around Rs 100 crore for 2003-04 as per industry experts and it is doubling every year. Adobe India wants to pitch Acrobat 6 Professional to this segment. For a long time, Acrobat was an application searching for a market. Adobe tried to pitch it as a solution for pre-press with some degree of success but it is only in the last couple of years that Acrobat has found its niche in document management. In stark contrast to its predecessor that followed a one-size-fits-all policy, Acrobat 6 comes in three flavours—Elements (PDF creation), Standard (collaboration and PDF creation) and Professional. Acrobat 6 Professional is targeted squarely at this segment with robust collaboration features and support for applications such as AutoCAD and Visio.

Acrobat as a document management solution

Previously Acrobat was purely a PDF (Portable Document Format) creation tool with support for MS Office and limited collaboration. Today it is a full-blown electronic workflow solution.

"While we had Acrobat 5 earlier, it was looked upon as a PDF creation tool that could only be used from MS Office," says Sandeep Mehrotra, channel account manager, Adobe Systems India. Version 6 can pull data out of a SAP database to create a read-only PDF, letting enterprises share crucial information without having to worry that it will be tampered with en route.

Acrobat 6 Professional lets enterprises build forms that can be digitally signed using Acrobat Reader 5.1 that supports Adobe Document Server for Reader extensions. These extensions let government agencies and private companies add forms-processing tools to Adobe Reader, letting you and me download, save, fill in, digitally sign, and submit PDF forms without having to be online for the entire duration of filling out the form. That may not seem like much until you realise that the Income Tax department puts up its forms online in PDF. Unfortunately they don’t use this feature, leaving you with no option but to print the form and fill it in manually. The US government actively encourages online filing of tax returns. In India, we have some way to go on that front but technology like this can help bridge that gap.

Robust collaborative features

Collaborative features are more powerful in Acrobat 6. It has publishing-friendly features such as support for colour separation and previews. You can send PDFs for review by e-mail and the response will come back in FDF. Form Data Format (FDF) lets you save data filled into an Acrobat form. The journal feature keeps track of when a PDF was sent for review. Last but not least, you can export comments to Word XP and round-trip documents from Word to Acrobat 6 and back again.

AutoCAD support for engineering companies

Acrobat 6 Professional extends PDF creation to AutoCAD, Visio and Microsoft Project. For engineering companies the AutoCAD support is a big plus. Acrobat 6 Professional lets you create PDFs from AutoCAD files with some degree of support for AutoCAD layers, and you can send only a particular layer of an AutoCAD file. This results in a smaller PDF that’s faster to send rather than sending the whole AutoCAD file.

While you could use Acrobat 4 or 5’s PDFmaker or Distiller tools to create PDFs from AutoCAD in the past, the process was long-winded and complicated; you ended up with huge files. There was no built-in support for the AutoCAD file format in prior versions. Acrobat 6 Professional supports AutoCAD layers while exporting to PDF.

Marquee clients

Adobe customers using Acrobat 5 in India include Engineers India, Census India, i-flex and Infosys. Acrobat 6 has just been released, but with the existing base of customers for its predecessor it stands a good chance of getting adopted by Indian organisations as an electronic workflow solution.

Engineers India (EIL), a public sector company that provides engineering and related technical services for refineries and other industrial projects, has been using Acrobat for the past two years, bringing down overhead costs (paper printing, courier, fax) by 20 to 25 percent. EIL has been able to reduce material surplus costs from 5 percent to 2 percent—material costs account for 80 percent of any EIL project. A 20-50 percent reduction in administrative expenses for handling paperwork and faster search capabilities are other benefits.

Census of India (CoI) has 31 regional offices and it caters to everyone from the Planning Commission to corporate houses. CoI is looking at converting existing paper data to PDF using Adobe Capture and Acrobat 5.