Team collaboration and project review cycles can be enhanced and improved with the new integration of Adobe Acrobat X with two of Microsoft’s major enterprise software applications: SharePoint and Office.

Adobe has recently announced built-in support for SharePoint within Acrobat X; supported versions include SharePoint 2007 SharePoint 2010, Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010. Many IT departments already integrate SharePoint with Office, but the editing limitations of PDF documents limited the collaboration of PDF documents.

The PDF format is the defacto standard for the secure exchange of documents and the format is accepted around the globe because of the clarity of the various content types and the accessibility by anyone with the free Adobe Reader software. With the new integration of Acrobat X with SharePoint, enterprise teams can now collaborate with PDF documents as easily as with Office documents.

Forrester Consulting recently completed a study called “Building the Future of Collaboration”. Results of the study showed that fully two-thirds of knowledge workers in the United States and in Europe regularly collaborate with colleagues in other locations and different time zones. The most-often used collaboration tool has been email, but that has presented several challenges:

Documents must be sent as attachments to emails and must be opened, edited, and commented on other disparate operating systems.

Email attachments often have a size limit and consume a high amount of space on enterprise servers.

Email is often not secure after it leaves the corporate firewall.

The seamless integration of Adobe Acrobat X into the SharePoint and Office platforms overcome the deficiencies of email collaboration by creating a digital collaboration solution. The document owner first creates a PDF file using an ad-in called “PDFMaker” and prepares it for review by uploading it to the SharePoint Server with an automatic link to the document and invites reviewers to leave comments. The document owner automatically receives and compiles comments from the reviewers all in one document. Reviewers can see the review deadline, see who else has responded, and supplement the comments of others.

The final document can be password protected and archived on the SharePoint server for future reference. All reviewed and archived documents are searchable with the free Adobe PDF Filter.