Adobe Acrobat 5

The Swiss Army Knife of Knowledge Base Publishing

February, 2002

If we had to select a single tool for adding value to documents on the desktop, it would be Adobe Acrobat 5. Like the Swiss Army Knife, it can perform an amazing variety of practical tasks in the trenches, where readers actually use, manipulate, archive, and share content. Next to a relational database, we can't think of a more valuable tool for increasing the productivity of people who find, analyze, and synthesize information for a living.

Although it's often classified as a graphics program, Acrobat 5 is really a document-centric content management tool. "Document-centric" means that security, collaboration, and indexing functions are tied to a single document (instead of a database or directory structure). That makes it perfect for upstream knowledge management , where most of the intellectual work -- e.g. composing, indexing, abstracting, annotating -- gets done locally by authors and subject matter experts. Acrobat's broad set of features makes it useful in a variety of applications, including:

• Commercial and corporate publishing

• Training and education

• Research and writing

• Electronic commerce

• Industry-specific applications such as legal and financial services

In this article we summarize the reasons why Acrobat 5 won PC Magazine's " Best of 2001 " and ZDNet's " Editor Choice " awards, explain how we use it, and compare it to other programs with similar capabilities.

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Created on March 2, 2002 I Updated on November 1, 2006