Adobe Introduces the Adobe Acrobat 8 Family

This is the slogan under which Adobe Systems Inc. have debuted the shipping of the Adobe Acrobat 8 family of products. Consisting of Acrobat 8 Professional, Acrobat 8 Standard, Acrobat 8 Elements, Acrobat 3D Version 8, Acrobat Connect, and Acrobat Connect Professional, the Acrobat family is immediately available for download.

"Acrobat 8 builds on Adobe's heritage in the digital documents business, and unveils a truly comprehensive set of capabilities for working with PDF documents within a sleek, modern user experience. The product line introduces several major innovations for professionals in a wide variety of areas, such as architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), IT, legal, marketing, manufacturing, and publishing," wrote Adobe in a press release.

Acrobat 8 Professional, available in English, French, German, and Japanese language versions, delivers support for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. "The Mac OS X version of Acrobat 8 Professional is a Universal Binary that will install on Intel and PowerPC based Macintosh systems," revealed Adobe. Acrobat 8 Professional comes with an estimated retail price of $449, an upgrade cost of $159 from previous products such as Adobe Acrobat 5.0, 6.0 Standard, 6.0 Professional, 7.0 Standard, 7.0 Professional and also offers a 30-day trial period.

Acrobat 8 Standard's support is limited to Windows-based machines, but this product too is available in English, French, German, and Japanese and for a 30-day trial period. The ERP for Acrobat 8 Standard is $299 and upgrades cost just $99. Adobe Reader 8 is scheduled for availability for the beginning of December 2006.

"The Acrobat Connect hosted service is immediately available as a free trial through the end of the current calendar year. The trial can be accessed via the "Start Meeting" button in Acrobat 8 and Adobe Reader 8. The commercial release of Acrobat Connect, initially in English, is expected to be available in January 2007 for a subscription price of US$39 per month, or US$395 per year per personal meeting room," stated Adobe.

Adobe Acrobat 8 Elements will be made available in mid-2007 and ads security to the PDF documents with permission protection and password restrictions. Adobe Acrobat 3D can be acquired for $995, while upgrades cost $545, and enables the publishing, sharing, reviewing and marking up 3D designs.

"Design and construction processes are notorious for being inefficient and paper-intensive," said John Moebes, director of Construction, Crate & Barrel. "With building costs growing at about 10 percent annually, we need tools like Acrobat 8 and PDF that act as force multipliers, enabling one person to do a job that previously might require several people. For instance, with advances in Acrobat 8, many design and construction documents can now be combined into a single, more secure PDF package and delivered in seconds nationwide to project teams that can review, comment on and digitally sign materials simply using Adobe Reader."

Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0.0 has been tested by Softpedia as being 100% Clean and is available for download here.