Adobe and Dropbox make the PDF truly mobile

The integration addresses a strong need, as PDF is the most common business file type in Dropbox, and can do so from today by adding their Dropbox account to Acrobat DC or Adobe Reader on the desktop, with iOS integration between Reader and Dropbox available “in the coming months” and Android and web integration arriving in 2016. “Our work with Dropbox, as our first file sync and share partner, will help Adobe Document Cloud customers and people around the world be more productive with the documents at the center of their daily lives”.

Customers of Adobe Acrobat DC and Adobe Acrobat Reader-used can now access and take common actions on over 18 billion PDF files stored in Dropbox directly from within the Adobe apps.

“As the inventor of PDF, Adobe brings over 20 years of experience with secure digital documents”, said Kevin M Lynch, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe Document Cloud at Adobe in a statement on Tuesday.

Adobe has also unveiled new e-sign capabilities in Adobe Document Cloud, a service that enables users to digitise documents and store them in the cloud using a consistent online profile and personal document hub.

Speaking of partnerships, Adobe also announced today a new agreement with Dropbox created to help workers access documents and files from anywhere. “We provide the world’s simplest, most powerful collaboration platform for the creative and entrepreneurial lives of our 400 million users”.

The deal also lets users access files from Reader Mobile or Acrobat DC on the desktop, update and share files using a Dropbox link or shared folder.

Finally, Adobe’s e-signature capabilities have been integrated with Workday’s business process framework. New features include a visual drag-and-drop workflow designer, digital signatures (a more advanced, secure form of e-signatures) and Enterprise Mobility Management and Signature Capture and syncing for mobile signatures. The upcoming new APIs will enable third-party applications to have a tighter integration with the Adobe eSign service – be it through ensuring the organizational workflow processes that have been defined within an account are followed from external applications, or by ensuring that documents being automatically generated from external systems have the appropriate form fields and signature fields in the right places within the document.

What’s handy about this is you can doctor your PDFs a bit and send them on to colleagues straight away, which could be a huge time savers for business people on the go.

Document Cloud’s eSign capabilities got a host of new features that move print-and-sign workflows closer to extinction.

In conjunction with the new Dropbox pact, Adobe is also updating eSign for Document Cloud to simplify the electronic signing of documents. Using the eSign Manager DC mobile app, employees will be able to take a photo of their handwritten signature and then use it to repeatedly sign documents. However, the companies will soon be rolling out an integration for iOS so mobile users who would otherwise have to flip between different apps in order to open their files won’t need to.