Shared reviews and Rich Media PDF's - broke my heart.

Working in advertising... I was so excited to see that Acrobat 9 Pro Extended had pushed forward to a point where videos, flash, and websites could be embedded into a PDF and sent out for annotations to be collected. It was dream come true… (sniff – wipe tear from eye).

But just as fast as I fell in love with this idea – my heart was immediately broken.

Why you ask? Because - if you routed this Rich Media PDF via shared review (SharePoint, WebDav on an internal server) you were sunk because once comments were published – and the next reviewer retrieved those comments they were never properly parsed or synched to the exact frame the other reviewer had posted it to. In the end, what you witnessed was all of the comments stacked on top of the video - total chaos (insert broken heart).

The only way around this issue is to save the comment directly to the file (or in other words – save over top the file and don’t publish comments)- which makes the Shared Review pointless - and requires a lengthy sequential routing process – and in my humble opinion, ripe for a QC train wreck.

So here I sit, over a year later waiting for Adobe to call me and tell me it’s fixed, that the bug has been squashed.

So I ask Adobe… are we close? Can we get back together?

In all seriousness – anyone have a fix for this?