Typical System Administrator Review Of Adobe Acrobat Reader And Pro

In my opinion, Acrobat is the DeFacto standard when dealing with PDFs in a business context. The Pro version is used to edit PDFs and to convert other document types into PDFs. The Reader version is more limited and so far free. The Pro version does have a variable cost depending on licensing. The business problem that Acrobat solves is the conversion of other file types into PDFs. Yes, Word Excel and Outlook all can save in PDF format but the humans I have to support don't want to use other more efficient methods. The only upside of the free Reader version is that it can be deployed from the MS app store via InTune. The Pro version is also pushable but requires more time and effort from SystemAdmins. Are there other software options? Absolutely. Are they better or feature complete compared to Acrobat? Mostly yes, but its a really hard sell to get a medium or large organization to use something like FoxIt because while it does everything Acrobat does, it looks different and the menus are different and the humans don't like change and cannot adapt to different software even if their very lives depended on it.

In my opinion, there is absolutely no effort put into security at Adobe. That would surely take away valuable time making sure that the entire portfolio of Adobe software isn't hot garbage in a frying pan. For a solid decade between 2005 and 2015 there were weekly updates for Acrobat that were completely reactionary to how malware producers were taking advantage of all the security holes in Acrobat to spread their malware.