All-new Acrobat DC Helps Creatives Streamline Reviews

How many of you dread sending your creative work out for review and feedback, not because you’re not confident or you can’t take a critique, but because the process just sucks? Did the client get the design or did it get stuck in a spam folder? Did they open it? What do they think? Why haven’t they responded yet? Should I remind them of the deadline for approval? Sending something for review brings up so many questions!

If you’re like me, you usually create a PDF of your work in Acrobat and send it out to clients, managers and colleagues as an attachment, or a link in an email. What happens next is typically a mix of pain and agony that gets exponentially worse as you add more reviewers – managing versions and reconciling conflicting feedback through email and reminding people to open, review, and get back to you with their thoughts.

Luckily, Adobe came up with an answer for all of your creative feedback woes by releasing an all-new version of Acrobat DC today. This release includes new tools for sharing and reviewing PDFs and easily getting feedback from any number of reviewers. A completely redesigned Acrobat Home view acts as a central hub to keep track of all incoming and outgoing documents that are sent out or that are sent to you. And, if you need to edit a PDF on the fly, it’s no problem because Adobe introduced full PDF text and image editing capabilities on iOS and Android tablets. The best thing is that everything in Acrobat DC functions the same whether you are on your laptop, a tablet, or on a phone.

As a member of Creative Cloud who subscribes to the All Apps plan, you already have access to Acrobat DC (most of you already know that because you’ve made it one of the top three most used apps in Creative Cloud!) so you just have to update your app to get the latest and greatest. Adobe also introduced full PDF editing, for text and images, through the Acrobat Reader mobile app on iOS and Android tablets.

Here’s a quick run-through of why I LOVE this new review service that I’ve been playing around with in beta:

You can easily enter people’s names or email addresses from your contacts and they will receive an automated message from Acrobat telling them that they have a PDF to review. You can also get a link to share that via email, Slack, or however. People will be added to the review automatically when they click through the email message or the link.

Because it is hosted in Adobe Document Cloud, you don’t have to send attachments and feedback back and forth via email, because even PDFs can be too large and get stuck in a spam folder. And, all the various feedback lives on one single document.

You can set due dates and reminders. No one wants to be the bad guy that has to constantly remind someone to review a design. Acrobat manages that for you.

Half the time I feel like I get feedback right in the email and not on the PDF, so I have no idea what the client is referencing in the design. That’s why I love that highlighting and commenting can be added right into the design that I want them to review, and they can add comments to specific characters in this case. Anyone can do it intuitively from their laptop, tablet, or smartphone, just like they would in Acrobat or Reader.

You can use @mentions to get another reviewer’s attention on a specific area. Multiple reviewers can use also @mentions to resolve conflicting feedback without going back and forth over email.

I know if someone has opened and reviewed my PDF at-a-glance. If I added several reviewers I could click into the review to see who has viewed it, who has not, and who signaled that they are done editing.

Lastly, I love how reviewers don’t need to download or sign into any anything to give feedback from any device. Reviewers don’t even need to be Creative Cloud or Acrobat DC users or subscribers. But, I bet they’ll want to after seeing how slick it is to initiate reviews and gather feedback without the headache.

I’m really happy that Adobe has taken care of the annoying review and approval cycle and made it as seamless as it can be!