The array of enterprise communication formats available today has expanded, ranging from instant messages to blogs and wikis, as well as more traditional means such as email and internal web pages. But documents, including proposals, requirements, plans, agreements, and reports, remain the primary currency of business, and document collaboration continues to be a core activity of knowledge workers in their day-to-day work.

As a result, knowledge workers are demanding and need more efficient and effective tools for document collaboration and exchange. As IT organisations look to enhance or expand their enterprise collaboration capabilities, they should consider three important trends and their implications:
• Project teams that span multiple third-parties are becoming the norm, and the need to maintain security outside the firewall is increasing.
• The need for dynamic documents that enable more effective and engaging communications is growing.
• Reducing costs via better efficiency remains at the top of the executive agenda.
Global collaborators are distributed—inside and outside the enterprise.

Increasingly, enterprises are made up of teams that are scattered far and wide. Based on a Forrester Consulting study commissioned on behalf of Adobe, “Building the Future of Collaboration,” 73% of knowledge workers collaborate with people in different time zones and regions at least monthly.

But these diverse teams aren’t just inside the enterprise: 67% of employees report working with people in other companies at least monthly.

“As collaboration grows in importance for knowledge work, the tools must embrace and refine current work habits, while also enabling a transition to more efficient and effective communication and collaboration,” Forrester Consulting reports.

Distributed teams are no doubt driving the need for better collaboration tools—especially when it comes to document exchange. Workers frequently collaborate and exchange documents with people outside the company, such as suppliers, partners, agencies, and customers.

For Parsons Brinkerhoff (PB) Australia–Pacific, Acrobat X is providing a way to standardise document output and improving collaborative workflow on the major planning, environment and infrastructure projects it is involved with.

Part of a 14,000-strong global team working in 150 offices across six continents, (PB) Australia–Pacific has standardised on Adobe’s new release of Acrobat X professional for its design and drafting teams that generate thousands of critical drawing and project documents each year.

Enterprise Group IT Consultant Rob Pek said the rollout of Acrobat X had helped overcome a major challenge in ensuring individuals working on different versions of AutoCAD design packages on different workstations worked to a common output standard.

“One of our big hurdles has been getting a consistent output throughout the entire team without spending a huge amount of time configuring each PC as it gets rolled out,” said Pek.

“We had a lot of problems in the past where schematics were printed out for jobs we are pitching on with missing information. Getting onto a standard platform for everyone has been great.”

One of the major new features introduced in Acrobat X is the ability to record and export “Actions”, workflow steps in the production of a document. This feature is familiar to users of Adobe’s Creative Suite of products, and highly valued as a way to ensure repeatable workflow.

“It's definitely been a great help for us,” said Pek.

When CAD documents are created at PB Australia-Pacific, the typical workflow sees them distributed via shared drives on the local network. Corrections are applied to the PDF internally and also through project partners, then the marked up PDF is returned to the CAD designers for final modifications.

One of the key new features in Acrobat X - one that has removed the need to interrupt this workflow when non-design elements need to be changed - is the ability to export data into a rage of different Microsoft Office document formats.

There is a great advantage to being able to take a table that’s published in a PDF, export it out into Excel, make modifications there and then publish that back into the PDF.

“In the past we have a lot of financial data included with the design drawings , and once these were published to PDF they were treated as an image. Whenever there was a revision we would have to go back to the original document to make the modification and then publish that page back up again.

“We can now export that table to word or excel and just publish the changes back into the PDF,” said Pek.

Finally, the new automated forms capability with Acrobat X is assisting PB Australia-Pacific in the migration of a lot of existing paper-based forms. These are in the process of being converted to electronic Acrobat forms, and Acrobat X now provides the ability to automatically recognise the individual fields as a form is being scanned.

“Character recognition has been improved in the scanning engine as well, there is a huge difference with the early versions. Acrobat X is now capable of recognising a lot more of the text the first time around,” said Pek.