Likelihood to Recommend If your organization uses PDFs frequently, then Adobe Acrobat feels like must-have. I could not imagine our organization not using it. The ability to create, organize, and edit PDFs easily and intuitively are the main reasons my organization uses it. The other additional functions and features are "nice to haves", but ultimately, don't impact our day-to-day
Read full review XaitPorter is ideal when a large document, containing many (preferably independent) sections is being created by more than five writers across different office locations and is subject to review by multiple reviewers and requires formal approval. It is particularly suited for external documents which are to be delivered as a non-editable PDF file.
Read full review Pros Easy to understand- the program has a very intuitive layout that is great for people who doesn't use the product very much Includes all features you might need. There are many features I didn't even think we would need that they have included. They have a very recognizable name so my clients feel they can trust what they are being asked to open/sign since the Adobe name is next to it. Read full review This tool gives us the opportunity to work together. We always work in the last revision. We can write comments as we go along and all involved will see it straight away. We can structure it the way we want/our the way customer wants it and print the whole book in one go. We are sure that pictures/text/tables are where they are supposed to be (they have not moved around the document as it does when using Microsoft Word). Read full review Cons It would be good if Adobe Acrobat could utilize less system resources. I have had crashes due to memory and CPU load this week Quicker load times from a cold launch Easier collaborative commenting for offline documents - knowing where and who wrote what Ensuring documents don't have issues where text cannot be copied before publishing Read full review It would be helpful to improve functions used to organize and reorganize sections. They work fine, but could be retooled for ease of use. Simple drag-drop over the tree-view from the primary navigator (not only in the dedicated dialog for reordering sections) would be very good. It would be good to support simple flagging or tagging of sections to indicate whatever is meaningful to the user (e.g., to flag a section as imported text that needs formatting, or a section that is high priority for review). The icons do change to indicate predefined workflow states (e.g. approved), but there isn't support for a user-defined tag, perhaps with the ability to filter by tag as many newer applications can do. That would be handy. These aren't criticisms so much as product enhancement suggestions. The editor is ok but could be tuned up a bit. For example, styles in the toolbar dropdown apply only to the whole paragraph. It's hard to indent text. The button tool doesn't consistently remove the button attribute on an existing button; works sometimes, sometimes not. Little stuff. Overall it's adequate for text creation. The process of defining templates and styles appears to be a black art. While it's something you don't do often, it should be simplified and better exposed to ordinary admins. The ability to have more than one section open at a time in the editor would be fantastic. Great productivity tool. Word import/export could be cleaner. The ability to export to html with user-defined style sheets would open new markets for Xait. If the product had that, we'd use Xait to maintain our online help site too. The ability to link to externally stored images rather than lock them inside the Xait library would be huge, as we've expressed to the support team. We manage hundreds of images (diagrams, screen shots etc.) that are used throughout the company, not just for Xait documents. We would like to store them on a file system (e.g. Dropbox) and have them update into Xait automatically when the master copy is modified. This is a very important capability, though in fairness we didn't find it in other products either. Explicit support for Dropbox/Google Drive/Box would be one way, but dynamic linking a la Microsoft Word would be fine, maybe even better. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I bought a perpetual license to Acrobat some time ago, but if the software ever stopped being supported in my version of windows or other solution that makes me need to buy another license I would not hesitate to do so since it saves me a lot of headaches. There are workarounds to merge files and edit pdfs with an online interface but I dont think those are a good usage of time when Acrobat exists.
Read full review There are too many positive aspects versus negative.
Read full review Usability My overall experience with Adobe is great because because the it has almost all of the tools in one place and it can be used it for most of my work without going anywhere else. Because the tools are available right there in the main interface, it makes it very easy to use.
Read full review We find it to be intuitive to use with a simple menu and right-click based functionality in place.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Pretty much always there for my business and personal needs.
Read full review XaitPorter is always there even though we have issues with outages (suddenly the network does not work, but that is internal issue)
Read full review Performance One of the best features of Adobe Acrobat is its speed and stability. When dealing with massive multi-page files, having to reload a crashed program over and over again would slow down progress unnecessarily. And expanding on that, having the table of contents generated allows me to skip to different pages with ease, a necessary feature with exceptionally long files. word searches are even more helpful with text recognition.
Read full review Our reports/Tenders complete in a reasonable time frame, actually faster than Word. We have not integrated with other systems or softwares.
Read full review Support Rating Because I don't need it. Used it years ago for account management/billing issues but they have changed the user experience so more of that can be managed online. If I have a question the knowledge base or a video that Adobe has posted answers
Read full review They have a clear method for reporting any issues and work hard to get a resolution, keeping me informed of progress.
Read full review In-Person Training He was really good. He came from Xait and trained us for several days. He got all involved and answered the questions asked. He was a professional trainee
Read full review Online Training Answered basic questions.
Read full review The online training was really good. They know the way of getting people involved and they answered all questions asked. They were there for us.
Read full review Implementation Rating Works well with JamF and SmartDeploy. These are our Enterprise imaging solutions for Mac's and PC's. The Enterprise installer is required when pushing out this app.
Read full review I was really satisfied with the implementation
Read full review Alternatives Considered There really is no comparison. Although we use other PDF programs, we mainly utilize Adobe. Not only because we find it to be a better program but also because everyone is more familiar with it. However, the other products are implemented for various reasons, such as a feature or 2 that we find necessary to use at times.
Read full review The standard product for many years has been Microsoft Word. Some have tried to use SharePoint as a collaborative tool, but it is not suited for the purpose and is generally very user un-friendly. It is not intuitive and we have very few persons with any competency in it. Porter is easy to pick up and the new interface is very intuitive, and the way that Porter works removes many of the typical layout and formatting choices that made Microsoft Word so difficult for the average employee. It also greatly simplifies and reduces the amount of corrective work that tender support staff used to have to do. We are not aware of any product in the market that comes close to Porter. It is an ideal product that was purpose built for collaborative writing.
Read full review Scalability I find that many users aren't aware of many features of the software they use, nor may they be comfortable with learning multiple-step processes. For the simplest of PDF purposes (scanning, downloading, exporting), it gets a thumbs-up. For anything involving electronic signatures, meh--causes eyes to glaze over, or forgetting what all is involved.
Read full review I just love the system
Read full review Return on Investment Adobe Acrobat has improved the security of our documents, resulting in less risk, as protecting documents is essential to ensure compliance with privacy laws. It saves our company money, as the product makes it easier for our employees to complete their jobs. The product assists our employees with providing quality work product. Read full review Too soon to tell. Right now we're still at the near end of the value chain - it still seems expensive given the outputs to date. But we have a lower proposal volume than some companies, so you need to factor that in. Also, the named user licensing is restrictive and problematic in a small company where people perform multiple roles and may dip in and out of the proposal development process over a period of weeks or months. A concurrent user model would be much, much better for us, though I understand you'd need to figure out a way to handle email notifications. Read full review ScreenShots Adobe Acrobat Screenshots