Adobe Acrobat vs. PowerDMS by NEOGOV

When preparing artwork for print production from an application like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign, the best way to preview and preflight the work is to export to PDF and use Adobe Acrobat's output preview to check process colors, spot colors, dielines, and any special requirements, like foil stamping or varnish. Adobe Acrobat is also where you make any needed final adjustments to ensure correct reproduction on press. Documents intended for screen viewing must be exported to PDF and edited in Adobe Acrobat so as to add and edit needed accessibility features critical for legislative compliance.

Incentivized

Getting 100% signature compliance on policy updates used to take months but since automating out policy management updates in PowerDMS, we can get 100% compliance in as little as 2 weeks. Internal requests for things such as training, purchases, etc used to be pushed up the chain of command via a paper copy and would often get misplaced or lost in a full mailbox. Using PowerDMS to automate those requests put the power back in the requester's hands and increased transparency and accountability across the organization.

Incentivized

• For the business account, the Adobe Acrobat rep assigned to your account will actively look for ways to save you money.
• We have found that our rep from Adobe Acrobat Business Account reviews our usage and related apps and has offered helpful tips on better ways to complete tasks we historically undertake with their software. They have saved us a great deal of time and money. They make us efficient.
• The apps they offer that combine with the primary program are relevant to the tasks our business performs, and they function at a high level and never fail. It's really quite remarkable.

Incentivized

• PDMS is extremely user-friendly from both the administrator aspect and the user.
• The workflow process is awesome and easy to set up.
• PDMS's support team is barred none. We've never had issues with reaching out to find a simple solution to our challenges.

• More printing settings, like being able to adjust the margins and place the print area on the page when the file size is larger than the page, and I only want to print one section. Illustrator has this feature. Often, we print from Illustrator instead, because of this limitation.

Incentivized

• The Workflow process in PowerDMS is not as easy to grasp as some of the other concepts and requires a little more explaination, especially for non-administrative background users.
• Users are unable to view the steps in a Workflow template in order to determine which Workflow would work best for their needs when routing documents.
• It would be great to have multiple message options for past due inbox notifications in addition to the options for past due tasks to encourage users to go to their inbox to review their messages.

Incentivized

Adobe Acrobat works seamlessly with the other Adobe products we use that are industry-standard. We will certainly continue to use Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, meaning it will always be convenient to work seamlessly with Adobe Acrobat for our organization. We are happy with the performance of Acrobat and it's meets our expectations.

Incentivized

I have had nothing but positive experiences with PowerDMS from day one. If we ever run into a situation we are unsure of, PowerDMS support has ALWAYS been able to answer us basically immediately. I really love that they are constantly seeking to improve and expand.

It’s a very easy app to learn and software is essential. I feel like the app could load a bit faster but overall, is one of my go to apps. Makes reading and editing pdfs easy and I enjoy the usability of the app. It is definitely something I make sure to have downloaded on any computer I’m working from

Incentivized

While not necessarily user-intuitive, with a small amount of dedication to training and learning how the system functions, it becomes very usable. I would say that the usability scale is quite user-dependent. For a standard user that just needs to review and sign documents, it is very easily used. On the other end, management does a bit more of a learning curve.

We have not had availability issues with Adobe Acrobat, or at least none that I am personally aware of. Some may encounter crashes of the software during outages of electricity in their city or neighborhood, which no one can plan for, but with generators in our organization, we have been lucky not to have outages

Incentivized

Never had an issue with PowerDMS not being available. Speed is an issue from time to time

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.

Incentivized

We use PowerDMS in the cloud so our performance might be different from other users who use on-premise. The program has always been up with very minimal downtime and always seems responsive and snappy when navigating the UI and searching documents. We don't currently have any integrations with other software.

For a while, Acrobat DC crashed pretty frequently. I contacted Adobe Acrobat support about the problem. At first support was unable to provide a solution. After about a month Adobe's software engineers provided a fix. I just wish it had taken less than a month to solve the problem.

Incentivized

I just wish we had some in-state support. The contacts I have had with customer support have been great. Awesome communication, problem-solving, and support. I have talked to and met Stephanie Williams (CSA for Power DMS) at the most recent Entrust conference. She was professional and devoted time to addressing our agency needs.

In-person training works really well.

Answered basic questions.

Incentivized

Online training works well and keeps from having to have classroom training

I was not involved with the implementation process, so I cannot answer this question. However, when it was installed on my computer system, they did so virtually. I just sat there while they took control of my computer over the network and watch them install it, lickety split

Incentivized

Implementation of PowerDMS was near seamless. The product was able to input existing policies and procedures within a few hours, which helped to lay the foundation for future use. Having PowerDMS on-boarding readily available was also a huge benefit.

DocuSign was the main alternative we looked at seriously. The E-Signature side is comparable, but DocuSign does not give you the broader PDF editing and OCR capabilities, so you would still need another tool alongside it. Acrobat made more sense as a single tool that covered document editing, OCR, and signature without stitching multiple products together

Incentivized

Our previous document product was Image Silo. It was a stable-enough product, but was strictly an indexed filing system. PowerDMS goes well beyond indexing (which it does very well) and provides countless more features and functions as described above. I would describe the difference between our previous product and PowerDMS like the difference between the library and the Internet. Both contain information, but on is limited, while the other has it all.

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.

Incentivized

Because of features and functions.

• Again, the ability to make multiple versions of a PDF has helped speed up getting them to the warehouse and making it easier to print for them!
• In marketing, there are multiple uses of Adobe Acrobat where it speeds up our process making us more efficient.

Incentivized

• Created efficient processes for approving document revision
• Migrated what originally was a paper system to electronic
• Accessible for any employee by logging in, employees do not have to seek out policy and procedure binders, and updated documents can be automatically sent to inboxes when updated.

Incentivized