Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Professional Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Adobe comes out and delivers another fine Acrobat product. While I purchased this for the sole purpose of creating PDFs and forms we could email our customers, have them fill out, save and email back, the brief touches I've had with the automatic form generators have left me impressed. The user interface is well thought out and clean which is a touchy subject for me personally as a programmer who specializes in UI design. Everything is movable, hide-able and customizable in a new sharp looking set of toolbars that should feel right at home in Windows Vista.
But, while it's a fine product that loads quickly thanks to a pre-loader when Windows starts, it does suffer from it's share of problems. The new user interface, while fancy, is glitchy, and has crashed out the software on more than one occasion. Simple innocuous tasks such as dragging a form element into alignment can suddenly leave you staring dumbfounded at your desktop as Windows defends itself from some index out of bounds fault. Is it entirely stable? No, but sadly, it's up to par with 99% of the industry's X.0 release software standards; which means it's 98% usable, but don't hand your boss an unpadded deadline that doesn't take into account a few crashes here and there.
Finally, yes, while the price of RAM continues to decrease, the memory (and hard disk) footprint of software continues to increase to obscene levels. Make sure your office equipment is on the more modern side because it'll take up 20meg+ of your RAM just when the computer starts; which is in this IT professional's opinion, a hefty price to pay just to look at PDFs in my web browser or on my hard drive without a 20 second load-up delay. Load it up and create a PDF of a simple Word 2003 document that contains only a page of text, and task manager tells you it's now eating up 50 meg. In short, it won't run well on the bargain-basement Intel Celeron, 256meg Windows XP machine.
As a final note for those who aren't heavily into IT looking to buy this product for their small office, you need to be connected to the internet when this is installed and be absolutely sure you install it on the computer it's going to permanently reside on. Like most expensive modern business software, Acrobat requires an activation in the name of Digital Rights Management that records it's serial number and the hardware ID of the computer it's installed on and keeps it on file at Adobe. One copy of the software will let you install it on exactly one machine. Try to install it on another machine (even if the original machine got obsoleted, kicked the bucket or transferred to different personnel), and you'll be met with a "this is already installed, please buy another copy" message. DRM forces forethought in these modern times.
Overall, it's excellent software, and for the faults I listed, I still give it 4 stars because it's an extremely solid product that'll work hard for you. Expect the crashing issues to clear up as Adobe silently releases 8.0.1 and onward as free patches that will be downloaded automatically thanks to Adobe's built-in upgrade manager. While executives balked at the idea of office personnel with 1 gig of RAM in a common desktops a year ago, in reality, that's the working minimum these days for your office's power users who may have eight things open and/or running at once. It's a $50 upgrade that to a power user, saves about 5 minutes of worktime on every hour of computer use. Do the math and get them the tools they need because software like this won't be getting less bloated anytime soon.
Finally, if all you're looking at is to create PDF files, there are many smaller, cheaper programs out there that can easily do the task. You might want to hit up Google and investigate further.

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Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional software enables business professionals to reliably create, combine, and control Adobe PDF documents for easy, more secure distribution, collaboration, and data collection. Combine files from multiple applications, collaborate on documents via e-mail or server, and collect information with electronic forms. Protect sensitive information with passwords and permissions. Enable users of Adobe Reader software (version 7.0 or 8) to participate in document reviews, fill and save forms, and digitally sign documents.

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