Adobe Acrobat 8, both the Professional and Standard versions have been upgraded in order to deliver better integration with Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Users of Windows Vista in concordance with Acrobat 8 have encountered various functionality issues and this refresh provided by Adobe is designed to fix all problems. Adobe has promised in fact that following the deployment of the update Acrobat will offer complete support for the 32-bit and the 64-bit editions of Windows Vista.

As of yet the only way to access the new version is via the application's upgrade services. Just launch Acrobat, and under Help in the menu select Check for Updates. The rest of the process is fully automated. "As of today, an update to Acrobat 8, upgrading Acrobat 8 to Acrobat 8.1 (Professional & Standard) is available via Adobe Updater (in Acrobat). A download on Adobe.com will be available later this month (I'll update you when it is live). The 8.1 release works with Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Vista. Both PDF as a file format and Acrobat as an application are now "first class" citizens in these environments," revealed Lori DeFurio, responsible for Customer & Field Enablement in Adobe's Knowledge Worker Solutions group.

Adobe Acrobat 8.1 will integrate seamlessly with the new Ribbon graphical user interface in Office 2007 while in Windows Vista the preview functionality has been tuned-up. Adobe informed that users will be able to convert any document in a supported format to PDF via the right click contextual menu. Additionally, in Outlook 2007, users will be able to view and navigate PDF documents attached to emails from in preview mode.

"Also - at the request of our customer base, we're supporting 64-bit Citrix and Windows environments. Acrobat is still a 32-bit application, but for folks running 64-bit Citrix environments, or who load Acrobat on a 64-bit Windows system, Acrobat will work as advertised," DeFurio added.