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Gary Edwards

Adobe's 2016 plans for Creative Cloud: Mobility, workflows and enterprise integration |... - 0 views

  • Since adopting the subscription model in 2012, Adobe has developed Creative Cloud by integrating services such as cloud storage, file sync, fonts (TypeKit) and photos (Stock), extending the capabilities of its traditional desktop applications into companion mobile apps, and, in 2015, introducing asset-based workflows powered by CreativeSync.
  • 'Assets' are Adobe parlance for format- and resolution-independent descriptions of content items such as bitmaps, vector graphics and video clips. Information on non-destructive edits, renditions for specific apps and devices, and linkages is held in metadata and orchestrated by CreativeSync, enabling multi-device workflows for individuals and more efficient sharing and collaboration for teams.
  • "In 2016, as we think about the next step for Creative Cloud, it's really about bringing CreativeSync and asset workflows to the next level," said Sharma.
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  • "It's about harnessing the power of content and making it relevant through the intelligence of data," said Sharma. This will involve "getting content and data together and creating workflows that cut across the three clouds so that enterprises can deliver relevant experiences to their customers, whether it's in the workflow of making the content, delivering it, or measuring its effectiveness."
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    "Hot on the heels of Adobe's Q1 2016 earnings figures, which included record overall revenue of $1.38 billion and record Creative Cloud revenue of $733 million, EMEA journalists were recently briefed on the company's plans for Creative Cloud in 2016 and beyond by the VP/GM in charge, Mala Sharma. Since adopting the subscription model in 2012, Adobe has developed Creative Cloud by integrating services such as cloud storage, file sync, fonts (TypeKit) and photos (Stock), extending the capabilities of its traditional desktop applications into companion mobile apps, and, in 2015, introducing asset-based workflows powered by CreativeSync. 'Assets' are Adobe parlance for format- and resolution-independent descriptions of content items such as bitmaps, vector graphics and video clips. Information on non-destructive edits, renditions for specific apps and devices, and linkages is held in metadata and orchestrated by CreativeSync, enabling multi-device workflows for individuals and more efficient sharing and collaboration for teams. These developments have helped to generate impressive growth in Creative Cloud subscriptions, which currently stand at just under 7 million following the addition of 780,000 new subscribers in Q1 2016:"
Gary Edwards

The PDF file format: A work in progress - SD Times - 0 views

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    "With almost every sector of the economy facing a digital transformation, businesses must find new ways to get their information and data online. No longer does it make sense to have documents stored on paper. To keep up with the ever-changing times, more and more businesses are turning to the Portable Document Format (PDF). "Due to proliferation of new platforms, devices, and technologies, providing a quality PDF solution is more challenging than ever before," said Catherine Andersz, director of PDFTron. "So far the PDF format stood the test of time, but it's facing challenges due to fragmentation and poor implementations of the standard as well as relevance in the new world of small devices." The biggest benefits to moving to PDFs are that businesses can guarantee their documents will be accessible, viewable, and printable by everyone at any time, according to Gerald Holmann, founder and president of Qoppa Software. Today, PDF viewers are available across browsers, operating systems and applications, making it ubiquitous, according to Matt Kuznicki, CTO of Datalogics. However, as more users take interest in the technology, there will be a wider range of industries that PDFs have to address. "The PDF format contains a huge set of features and functionality designed for different audiences, and understanding the needs and capabilities of different workflows is now more important than ever," he said. PDF 2.0… The PDF file format was once a proprietary format owned by Adobe systems. Today, it is an open standard maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The last version of the PDF standard Adobe put out was version 1.7. As part of PDF 1.7, Adobe added supplementals incorporating features that came out after the release. Since the standard was handed over to ISO, the organization has been working to integrate those features into the upcoming main standard, PDF 2.0. Notable features include redaction annotations and
Gary Edwards

The Same Page : Acrobat and Word for Commenting Part 2: Export PDF Comments Back to Word - 0 views

  • Marking the valid ones with a checkmark by right-clicking the comments and choosing “Mark with Checkmark” or just clicking the checkbox to the left of the comments in the Comment List of the Comments Navigation Panel. Note that this checkmark won’t appear in the document when viewed by others. Otherwise… Right-click on a comment and choose “Set Status > Review” and either “Accepted” or “Rejected”. You can also do this from the Comments List. Others will see this status for the comment as part of the review.
  • Export PDF Comments From Acrobat to Word To get started, choose Comments > Export Comments to Word… in Acrobat, or if you have the Comments list open, choose Export Comments to Word… from the Comments List Options button. What this will do is launch Microsoft Word, if it isn’t open already, and now that you are there, open the “Import Comments from Adobe Acrobat” wizard [I know, I know, that’s not the exact title of this article, but it is the same thing really]. If you are already in Word, or have the original DOC/DOCX document open, you can also go to the Acrobat ribbon (or menu) and choose “Import Comments from Acrobat…” under “Acrobat Comments”. If you haven’t been through this before, a screen of instructions will appear first: click OK to continue. You will then see one of three possible scenarios, depending on how you launched the wizard:
  • If you are coming from Acrobat in this step, the PDF file you had open before with all the comments will be shown under “Take comments from this PDF file:”. If you launched the wizard from within Word and the source DOC/DOCX file was open, it will be listed under “Place comments in this Word file:”. By default, the wizard will look for a PDF file in the same folder and with the same file name, and if it finds it, lists that too. It’s assuming that PDF file is the one that has comments. If you got to the wizard from Word with no file open, both fields will be blank.
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  • All Comments. This includes drawing markups such as polygons and callouts. If a comment or markup has a pop-up with text in it, then this will be made the text for the Word comment. The PDF comment or markup type, and the date that the comment was made, are also added to the Word comment text. For example, “Comment [08/21/09#3]:Highlight: The text from the pop-up.” All Comments with Checkmarks.This will only include comments and markup that you checked off using Acrobat’s Comments List, for example. Text Edits only: Insertions, Deletions and Replaces. This will just integrate the suggested changes to the Word document, and not just add the Text Edits as Word comments. Custom Filters, for the comments you would like to include and apply. With this option you can be choosy about what is imported and applied to the Word document, including which authors comments you would like incorporated. For example, you can specify that only comments and markup that you have checked and accepted be imported by the wizard. Everything else will be ignored.
  • Finally for this part, as you can see from the previous image, you can also instruct the wizard to turn on Word’s Track Changes feature so you can see what gets changed once the wizard has completed its task. Once you are back at the start of the wizard, the real fun begins when you click the “Continue” button. First, the wizard will go ahead and import all the PDF comments into the Word document (unless you filtered them using the options I mentioned before). You should see them over on the right hand side of the pages, as expected with Word comments, pointing to the location where they were originally added to the PDF file. You will get the best results here if the Word document was converted to a PDF file using Acrobat PDFMaker and was tagged, but it still works otherwise. The wizard will then report back on how many comments were imported to Word, breaking it up by Text Edits and Other Comments:
  • If you thought that was cool, just wait for the next part…Integrate Text Edits is the next optional step (click Cancel to skip it), and it does just what it says on the tin. The wizard will go through the imported insertion, deletion or replacement Text Edits comments, and apply those changes for you. Acrobat is even doing your work for you now! You can apply or discard them one-by-one by clicking on the appropriate button. You can then either click “Next”, or check the “Automatically go to next” option, and the wizard will jump to the next Text Edit comment and move the dialog and document so you can see the highlighted area to be changed. If you know you want to apply them all because you have already checked and/or accepted them in Acrobat beforehand, go ahead and click “Apply All Remaining”.
  • You don’t have to use what you see in the “New Text” field. As you can see in this example, a typo was missed in the original Text Edit comment: I don’t believe the author of this document really wants to extol the virtues of causing unwanted and annoying color changes to garments, but would rather mention the commitment to environmentally responsible practices [granted, I am the one who made the mistake]. Just go ahead and type in to that field what the text should be, and that is what the wizard will use. Once all the changes have been applied, the wizard wraps things up by giving you a final report on the text integrations it made, with a couple of tips for cleaning things up in your Word document via the Acrobat ribbon/menu, including merging tracked changes and deleting comment bubbles.
  • Now think back to what you just read or tried yourself, and how you would have gotten to that same result before. If you were lucky to have two monitors, you may have the PDF and DOC/DOCX files open side-by-side and visually scanned from comment to comment applying those changes as you saw fit. If you had only one monitor, it was either a) very large or b) you are beginning to wear out your Alt and Tab keys on your keyboard. You may also have printed out the PDF document with comments, or the Comments Summary from Acrobat, and visually scanned that for changes to make [not very (su)stainable]. Either way, it was a process that was certainly slower than using Acrobat’s Export(Import) Comments command, and probably had a greater risk of introducing errors or missing important changes. Give this real time-saver a try and see how it works out for you. Remember, for best results use a PDF document that was created from the same Word document using Acrobat PDFMaker – no refrigeration after opening required.
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    "Acrobat and Word for Commenting Part 2: Export PDF Comments Back to Word In Part 1 of this article, I wrote about exporting comments in a Microsoft Word document to a PDF file with comments when using Acrobat PDFMaker. When converting Microsoft Office files to PDF documents it is important, possibly even critical, to preserve as much information from the source as possible, and to have the option to be selective about it: Acrobat PDFMaker can help you there. But the really productive part is after you have received comments from others on a PDF version of the document, possibly via a Shared Review. That is the time you will want to apply - or integrate - the changes to the source Word document: you got it, Acrobat can help you out here too by exporting PDF comments from Acrobat back to Word. [As I stated in Part 1, this method applies only to supported versions of Microsoft Word on Windows. Apologies to my Mac brothers and sisters.] Before you get started, I suggest opening the PDF file with comments, going through the feedback and suggested changes from reviewers. This is so you ca determine what is exported to Word and then integrated for you [this is optional, but will save you some time later if you have a lot of suggested changes, some of which you know won't be integrated]. You can do one or both of the following: "
Gary Edwards

A Top Silicon Valley V.C. Explains Why Slack Drives Him Crazy | Vanity Fair - 0 views

  • I’m an investor in a company called Quip. The idea is, if you take Microsoft Office—Word and Excel—and re-do that with modern mobile materials, what does that look like? Suddenly you get this document-construction tool that’s infused with real-time notification and touch-screen collaboration, and it feels much more alive than typing a Word document.
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    "John Lilly, a partner at Greylock Partners, invests in companies that zhuzh office productivity tools for today's mobile worker. He sits on the board of Quip (a more collaborative Microsoft Word) and Figma (an Adobe Photoshop for the sharing generation), among others. He also led Greylock's investment in Dropbox, along with its stakes in Tumblr, acquired by Yahoo in 2013, and Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012. Before joining Greylock in 2011, Lilly was C.E.O. of Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, the Web browser that quietly grabbed share from Microsoft's then-dominant Internet Explorer in the early 2000s. While Lilly is betting on a new generation of Microsoft antagonists, he explains why he isn't writing off the software giant, how new tools will change the way we work, and why he finds Slack so vexing."
Gary Edwards

It's Time for Microsoft to Reboot Office - WSJ - 0 views

  • The target customer for much of Office’s evolution is corporate. But there are 15 million people who pay $70 or more a year for Office updates—and countless more who, like me, have bought Office for a home computer.
  • There’s a generational divide at work here: A survey last summer by the tech firm BetterCloud found that companies whose employee base averaged between 18 and 34 were 55% more likely to use Google than Office; those who average 35 to 54 were 19% more likely to use Office.
  • I'm a transactional lawyer, been using Word since 2002, and I think it's a terrible word processing program.  But we're stuck in it - there's no way out.MS has never fixed the two core horrible problems in Word - Styles and Section Breaks.  They should be removed from the program completely - there is no way to "fix" them.Before you say that they can be learned -- and I have indeed learned them -- here's the reality:  No one but me -- and I mean not one single lawyer or secretary I have ever worked or emailed with -- works correctly with Styles or Section Breaks.  Our long documents are emailed to the lawyers for the other parties, they make changes in their own, different Styles with additional manual formatting, and the documents become a mess.  Since we save and re-use our documents, I have to spend a lot of time cleaning them up, only to see them messed up again by the end of each deal.  And Styles can break by themselves.Word is junk.  Still inferior to 1996 WordPerfect.
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  • Thom - We still have WordPerfect on our office PCs.  We stopped using it because all our clients have only Word.  And no one has WordPerfect.  So what good does it do to make a document in WordPerfect when no one else can open it or revise it.We're stuck with Word, and it is awful awful awful. It was a shock how bad Word was when we switched from WordPerfect in 2002, and Word gets worse with each iteration.And it's not just Styles and Section Breaks; it's so many other things.I could do and edit macros in WordPerfect.  Not Word.Automatic numbering in Word is a failure, and Word does not play nice when we buy "add-ons" to try to fix that.Word does NOT incorporate an Excel spreadsheet easily, and Word's tables are below primitive.Word cannot even capitalize correctly in "Title Case", but WordPerfect could in 1996.
  • What Microsoft needs to do is fix some of the issues it's had for years - creating robust numbered/billeted lists that don't mysteriously change format - word styles that just work instead of changing anytime a word in that style is bolded. I spend more time fixing templates than I do using them in some instances. Word should look at Adobe FrameMaker for some methods on how they could simplify the application while making it more robust.
  • Fowler is correct that workplaces are the bread and butter of Office. Many home users who aren't students really don't need a complete office suite. But they never did - that's nothing new.
  • @Kevin Morgan, the problem is that everyone uses Office and Word.  They are compatible with offices across the world.
  • @Timothy D. Naegele @Kevin Morgan I think that the problem is that users (neither companies nor individuals) have pushed for standard formats such as open documents.  When you are tied to a particular standard, you are stuck with the platform.
  • @Vance Burks  Vance there are several very specific examples of things that make my teeth grind right here in Mr. Fowler's article.  I ran into exactly the same things. The biggest thing that bugs me about Office 365 is that you never know whether your document, or your edits are going to be there when you come back.  It relates to their decision to hold back the full feature set of the product, and the way they sync.  It's a flawed product architecture. With Google docs, it's sticky and I know that no matter what, my doc and my edits are going to be there when i return.  Also there are the annoying, unnecessary prompts - detailed in this article.  They are sort of Microsoft's signature, a symptom of their culture. I lived in Woodinville-Redmond for almost two years, and I never once met a happy Microsoft employee.  Well, there was one he has 18 patents and worked there for 25 years.  Then they fired him, and now he's unhappy too.  It's a very messed-up company. Unhappy culture.
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    "I've purchased the latest Microsoft Office for every computer I've owned. It was a foregone conclusion. Dating back to when Word was white type on a blue screen, I used it so often I could recite the shortcuts. (Thesaurus? Shift-F7.) But Microsoft has run out of reasons to keep me paying. How we get work done on computers has fundamentally changed. For the new Office 2016, Microsoft wants you to pay $150 for collaborative capabilities that others already do better, free. It brings little new to people who rely on deep features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Its mediocrity led me to a larger conclusion: It's time for Microsoft to press Control-Alt-Delete on the whole concept of Office. My relationship with Office started to sour as smartphones carried my work everywhere while my Office files stayed in the cubicle. I began emailing myself instead of fretting about scattered .doc files. Google ran with the work-anywhere idea early. Its free Web-based word processor and spreadsheet allow people in different locations to edit a document together. With Google Docs and Sheets, there's no more emailing drafts back and forth."
Gary Edwards

Enterprise startups to bet on in 2016 - Business Insider Deutschland - 0 views

  • Docusign: replacing paper signaturesDocuSignDocuSign CEO Keith Krach. Company name: DocusignHeadquarters: San FranciscoFunding to date: $508.1 million in 14 rounds Anytime your company’s name becomes a verb, it means you’ve made it. That’s the case with Docusign, whose name is almost used as a verb in the digital-document area ("just Docusign it"). Docusign offers a simple and secure way to sign documents online, allowing businesses to approve transactions on the go. It's used across many different industries, from real estate and auto insurance to technology and travel services. Investors have been lining up to throw money at this company, investing almost $400 million in just the last two years.
  • Zuora is a cloud service that specializes in subscription billing.
  • Tenable offers something called "continuous threat monitoring"
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  • Slack took Silicon Valley’s startup scene by storm, reaching a whopping $2.8 billion valuation in less than two years.
  • Its work-communication app isn’t just for messaging coworkers — it can do a lot of different things, from getting automatic Twitter notifications to calling a Lyft cab or looking up restaurants nearby.
  • Spark is a way to sift through massive amounts of data really fast. It can be used with a popular way to store all that data, Hadoop, but increasingly, Spark is being used on its own as an alternative to Hadoop.
  • Checkmarx helps software programmers check their apps for security holes.
  • Illumio is offers a security product that protects apps inside the data center even after a hacker breaks into the network.
  • MuleSoft offers technology that makes it easier for enterprise applications to talk to each other and share data.
  • Blue Jeans is becoming a household name in the enterprise videoconferencing scene. It created a cloud service that lets different people on different online video services, like Google Hangouts and Skype, talk to each other. It also has its own browser-based service, and recently expanded to broadcasting services too.
  • Qualtrics offers a service for doing sophisticated online employee or customer surveys. The company has been on fire lately, raising all of its $220 million in venture funding over the past three years
  • Insidesales is making life easy for a lot of salespeople. It can predict the best time and person to contact before making a sales call, using machine-learning and data intelligence.
  • Tanium impressed Sinofsky because it detects when hackers are attacking as the hack is occurring, instead of what usually happens, finding out after-the-fact.
  • Optimizely didn’t invent A/B testing, the standard technique in which two different versions of the same product are tested in the market — it just made it easier for everyone to do it.
  • Xamarin offers tools for writing enterprise mobile apps and has exploded in the past year.
  • CloudFlare is a web-performance and security company that serves as a “digital bouncer” for millions of websites around the world. Its technology filters the web traffic before it reaches its customers’ websites, and sends it on the most efficient route to help websites run faster. The company claims its service handles nearly 5% of all web traffic.
  • GainSight has won the respect of Silicon Valley investors by making a solution to help enterprises keep track of their customers — and help make sure they stay loyal. Customers like HP, Workday, and Adobe all use Gainsight to manage their customer contracts, helping divisions like product development, sales, and marketing all better understand just who's buying their stuff.
  • Adaptive Insights is quickly rising through the ranks in the corporate-performance management (CPM) market, where software is used to improve budgeting, forecasting, and other financial activities. In a nutshell, it’s trying to replace a lot of the work Excel spreadsheets used to do in the past for finance people.
  • Bracket offers software that lets enterprises securely run apps and data on multiple clouds, with a minimum of management hassles.
  • Enterprises are racing to ditch their data centers and use more clouds and there are a lot of clouds to choose from. Some want to mix and match and Bracket helps them do it.
  • While he was an engineer at Facebook, Avinash Lakshman created Apache Cassandra, a "big data" database originally built to handle Facebook’s Inbox Search feature.
  • Lakshman went on to found Hedvig, which offers software that makes all of a company's computer-storage systems act like one really big, really fast hard disk.
  • open-source project called Kafka, which quickly became a popular technology used by many big internet companies: Yahoo, Spotify, Airbnb, and many others.
  • left LinkedIn to launch Confluent, which provides a commercial version of Kafka.
  • created some of Facebook's most popular data-analysis tools, Bobby Johnson and Lior Abraham. They are famous in the big-data world for creating the open-source tools Scribe and Haystack.
  • With this startup, their mission is to do for every enterprise what Facebook did for friendships: Analyze billions of events in seconds to bring you the relevant info.
  • If you’ve ever used Uber before, chances are you’ve used Twilio’s service. Same goes for apps like Lyft, Airbnb, and Match.com. That's because these apps are plugging into Twilio’s service that helps provide communications features like text messages, phone calls, and video chat. So the Uber text message you get is powered by Twilio's service.
  • Twilio has become a top choice for developers looking to add communications features to their apps. More than 700,000 developers have used Twilio’s platform so far, the company says.
  • For small and midsize businesses that hire workers and contractors overseas, Payoneer solves a big problem. It lets them make and receive cross-border payments in other currencies. Payoneer has racked up a user base of millions of businesses and professionals in more than 200 countries, it says.
  • Stack Exchange, founded in 2008, has grown from its modest roots as a question-and-answer site for programmers into a network that provides expert help and advice to over 26 million programmers every month, at all skill levels.
  • SimilarWeb seemed to spring out of nowhere a couple of years ago to become a star in the web- and mobile-app-analysis world.
  • Mesosphere offers what it calls a Data Center Operating System (DCOS). It's a commercial version of an increasingly popular free and open-source project called Mesos that's used by developers.
  • AtScale is an engine that slips almost invisibly into Hadoop and then easily lets business managers use their favorite analysis tools like Excel,
  • Tableau Software, or Microstrategy with the data stored in Hadoop. 
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    "The 2015 holiday season is upon us and the year is drawing to a close. Soon our thoughts will drift to our hopes and goals for 2016. For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help. All of these companies specialize in making tech for work and business use, a $3.5 trillion worldwide market. All of them had spectacular years in 2015, by launching great new technology or getting a boatload of funding or landing big partnerships and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2016 and beyond."
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