Adobe Systems Incorporated today introduced Adobe® Acrobat® 8 software to provide knowledge workers innovative tools for communicating and collaborating with confidence across the boundaries of operating systems, applications and firewalls. With Acrobat 8, business professionals can now more effectively engage with the rich, high-value information in PDF documents and forms, and more reliably and securely drive their work to completion leveraging the ubiquitous, free Adobe Reader® software.

Building on the decade-plus heritage of Adobe in the digital documents business, Acrobat 8 unveils a truly comprehensive set of capabilities for working with PDF documents within a sleek, modern user experience. The streamlined user interface enables first-time users and professionals alike to explore the power of Acrobat by easily surfacing the most valuable tasks. The ability to start common activities ? such as combining, signing and protecting PDF files, interacting with PDF forms, reviewing and collaborating on documents, or launching a real-time web conference ? is now as simple as a single click.

"Hundreds of millions of users of Acrobat and Adobe Reader have established PDF as a trusted format that enables documents to flow between companies and across the gap between digital and print," said Tom Hale, senior vice president, Knowledge Worker Business Unit, Adobe. "With Acrobat 8, Adobe is enabling knowledge workers to use next generation electronic documents to easily collaborate with people, ideas and information, regardless of all-too-common operating system or platform constraints. With the addition of Acrobat Connect, they can take collaboration a step further to instantly and easily connect with each other in real-time over the web."

For the first time, all of the Acrobat 8 products, as well as Adobe Reader 8, provide one-button access to Adobe® Acrobat® Connect? 1 software, an easy-to-use, hosted software service that provides immediate access to a personal meeting room for real-time web conferencing (see separate press release issued today). Along with Acrobat Connect, Acrobat 8 further extends the family beyond simple PDF creation and now enables users to choose the most appropriate means for engaging others, through electronic documents or in real-time over the web.

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