Pdf News & Articles

Adobe keeps pushing Reader, making it more attractive and secure for business users. This week alone, it has addressed some of the security issues around PDFs as well as extending the functionality of EchoSign so that users will be able to receive and send documents for electronic signature within the application itself.

A mixed bag of document management news this week with SpringCM offering free content management to Salesforce.com customers, PDF finally arriving on iOS, Accusoft Pegasus has bought Adeptol, CenterBeam offers Office 365 challenger and Westbrook makes FortisBlue mobile.

Adobe Systems recently launched an application for iOS devices that lets users author files in Portable Document Format straight from their mobile devices. With CreatePDF, users can author PDFs that will appear onscreen the same way on a computer, mobile device or web browser.

Axaio (news, site) has beefed up its MadeToCompare PDF creation, change and version management tools to play happily alongside Adobe's Creative Suite 5 and Woodwing's cross-media publishing systems.

This week HP has launched a suite of new products that aims to offer enterprises developing hybrid clouds GRC across applications and infrastructure, Guidance extends e-Discovery software to iPad, Digital Reef and Relativity team-up for e-Discovery, and Protiviti adds Arabic to its governance portal.

It’s been a veritable document management feast this week with new releases from Adobe for better PDF use, Cabinet NG upgrading its CNG-WEB, tweeting for records management and Microsoft upgrading its Docs.com for Facebook. Meanwhile, Uncle Sam just keeps wasting money through pointless searches. In fact, across all releases this week, the common theme seems to be effective document search.

Document lifecycle management vendor Litéra (news, site) aims to make its products easier to use with Office 2010 and earlier versions, with the release of its new Launchpad that gives access to its solutions without integrating directly into Office.

While there are a large number of PDF converters on the market at the moment, there are few that can claim enough functionality so as to place themselves as a real competitor to Adobe Acrobat. The recent upgrade by Nuance of its PDF Converter to Enterprise 7 looks set to do that and, the company says, at a third of the price.

While much was made about the release of Office 2010 in May, the announcement that Microsoft intends to make an Office release for Mac in October has been relatively quiet. Also this week there has been a number of releases that aim to make PDF conversion much easier.

There has been a lot made this week of the announcement that Google is to offer a new PDF reader with Google Chrome that will add web-like functionality to documents. Appian integrates with AnyDoc to combine on-demand BPM with automated document capture.

For enterprises that border on the complacent when it comes to security, the latest report from IBM (news, site) which shows document format vulnerabilities and related attacks are soaring --  particularly with PDFs -- might act as a wake-up call.

Nuance (news, site) offers up a new document reader that can turn PDFs into Office documents.

Following the release of a new PDF management suite earlier this month, Litéra (news, site) has announced that it has signed a final agreement to buy document creation and automation provider SoftWise Corporation.

Like most of these deals the price that the North Carolina-based document content lifecycle management company paid has not been released, but the deal will see Litéra add feature-rich document creation, template management and numbering to some of the components in its DCLM suite.

The deal means that Litéra’s DCLM software suite now enables users to create, collaborate, compare and cleanse documents as they move through the document lifecycle.

Litéra, which works principally with corporations and law firms, says the acquisition was prompted by the need to provide standardized document creation and process automation using a single interface.

Both companies have assured existing SoftWise clients that they will continue to get software support from the company with the deal including a move by Bill Robertson, president and founder of SoftWise, to Litera as Vice President of Client Development.

Explaining the decision to move in with Literal, Robertson said that after the two companies co-developed the Metadact software, a security product that reduces the risk of unintentional disclosure of confidential information embedded in Microsoft Office, the move “was the right move for our company and customers . . “

The list of applications that SoftWise brought with the deal will definitely be beneficial to Litera as well as complementing the DCLM suite.

Lifecycles. They exist in just about every form, from humans to honeybees. But forget biology, let’s talk about the lifecycle of your documents.

That’s right. Everyday you create a new document, review and format it just the way you want. Then you save it as a PDF to give it that clean, polished look. But the lifecycle of the document rarely ends there. There are always revisions and edits, forcing you back into the original document to spend your valuable time fixing margins and tampering with page numbers, just to save it as a PDF again.

Consequently, very few of us would consider a PDF a working document. Until now.

In what is being described as the deepest integration with Autonomy’s (news, site) iManage document management software to date, Australian-based DocsCorp (news, site ) has announced upgrades to both its pdfDocs Desktop and pdfDocs compareDocs so that the two can be integrated into iManage out-of-the-box and without any special connectors.

Specifically targeting legal, financial and government agencies, the new integration gives users of iManage a whole pile of new PDF management features from pdfDocs Desktop including editing, file splitting, annotation and stamping.