Airbus adopts Acrobat 7.0 world-wide to take collaboration to the next level

Airbus has adopted Adobe Acrobat 7.0 world-wide, and plans to deploy 32,000 seats of the Professional and Standard versions over the rest of this year. What’s interesting, beyond the scale of the implementation, is that it’s not only for PDF documents: the group intends to use Acrobat’s latest features for company-wide and external fast digital collaboration. It clearly believes that Adobe’s new security features are up to the task, and says that it will also be using the audit trailing and archiving facilities. Airbus makes the point that, with employees around the world using a wide spread of applications and file formats for project work throughout aircraft project, subassembly and component lifecycles, standardising on Acrobat-enabled electronic processes based on dynamic digital documents will enable significant new efficiencies. Specifically, Acrobat 7.0 and Adobe PDF will enable Airbus teams in different departments and sites to share and collaborate on documents created from virtually any of its applications – and that includes its CAD, PLM (product lifecycle management) and ERP systems. Employees, partners and customers will be able to view, interact with and print files they exchange using Acrobat or the ubiquitous free desktop Adobe Reader clients – of which there are now around half-a-billion world-wide. With Acrobat 7.0 Professional, for example, Airbus engineers and designers can consolidate 2D and 3D CAD drawings from its PLM system, with Excel spreadsheets, technical diagrams, Word documents, web sources and other 2D and 3D images, and embed them all onto PDFs. They can also add Adobe’s new dynamic security locks, and share very granular information with extended workgroups across functions for review, mark-up and approval. Recipients using Acrobat 7.0 will also be able to collaborate using standard commenting tools across a wide variety of platforms and devices. And where enabled by Acrobat 7.0 Professional, even users of Adobe Reader 7.0 will be able to participate in electronic review and approval. Further, the PDFs can be viewed and manipulated as if they are original CAD design images since Adobe uses Universal 3D (U3D) standard conversion supported by the 3D Industry Forum (www.3dif.org) and Adobe, Intel, Boeing, Caterpillar and others. Not only does this make collaboration within the design project faster, easier and cheaper without the need for widespread CAD licenses, but it also extends the scope of collaboration. For example, users well beyond engineering can also gain similar access and involvement, using their familiar document interfaces but now with version- and security-controlled, integrated data. Interactive building and servicing instruction manuals, integrated procurement forms and so on are all possible. The scope for business process improvement is tantalising. It’s also worth noting that with every reviewer comment made on a layer of the original document, suggested revisions do not interfere with the original, ensuring document integrity. Also, digital signatures can be applied to a PDF, helping prevent unauthorised tampering and document fraud. As for security: Acrobat 7.0 and Adobe Policy Server give users advanced security functionality that can protect IP far more effectively than hietherto. A range of policies can be given to a PDF, covering for example printing and reading rights and PDF lifespan. Using Adobe Policy Server, corporate security can be imposed on any PDF leaving a company firewall: meaning rights to a PDF can be removed at any time – so that wherever, whoever and whatever device is being used, the document dies.