Will Collab.showAnnotToolsWhenNoCollab be supported in Acrobat 10

Sorry, we can't confirm or deny details of future Adobe software until it's released to the public.

There is however a general principle applied to all features of APIs ([b]though I'm not saying it applies here[/b]) that users are given at least one product cycle with a "depreciated" object before it's removed, unless the feature has been killed by a forced change (such as a security patch, or the loss of some external resource the feature relied on). This is to ensure as many in-the-wild documents as possible continue to work as the author intended, but there can be no guarantees.

Although "browser-based reviews" were specifically deprecated in Acrobat 9, the Collab object was not. However, the quote I cited in my original post implies that since the Collab object is used only for "browser-based reviews" that it, too, would be deprecated and, based on what you wrote, removed.

So, on the assumption that the Collab object will be removed, how will we expose the "Comment & Markup" toolbar absent Collab.showAnnotToolsWhenNoCollab?

Please bear in mind we work under strict NDAs, so no matter how obliquely the question may be posed, we can't say what is and is not going to be in A10 or R10 until the day it's released to the public (and no, we can't say what that date is either). However, if you're patient for a while, you may find the question becomes somewhat moot.

Remember, before CS5 launch day, nobody was expecting CS Live. The whole concept of how documents of all types are shared and reviewed is evolving rapidly, so some of the older methods will naturally fall by the wayside, to make way for new ones.

Adobe is promoting collaboration through other products, so Adobe is committed to collaboration. How this will be implemented in Acrobat and other products may depend upon other technologies. It has taken years to get PDFs to the current collaboration capacity. And it has a number of issues due to the supporting hardware and network structures.

In many ways this is like video conferencing, I saw the AT&T pavilion at the Montreal World's Fair in 1967 and the video conferencing exhibit, and how long was it before this ability became practicable?PDFs have greatly changed since they were introduced in 1993.

What happened to Novell's [url=http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-16915643.php ]Tumbleweed[/url] product?

Even if a tester could disclose what appears in a beta release, many times the final production product will not have all the features of the beta test version. So you should wait for the production release to see what and how the product will work. Yes, your users maybe upset about the changes in the production release, but they will be even more upset if some of the features in the beta test they have tried and like are not present in the final product. It is a good practice to be cautious when adapting new technology the depends heavily on other supporting technology.

I'm not concerned about new features that may or may not be in Acrobat 10, but about old tried-and-true features that we have relied on since Acrobat 6.

My users will not be upset with anything in Acrobat 10 so long as they can continue to review PDFs from a web browser (which means they will need the "Comment & Markup" tool bar).Unfortunately, I can't afford to wait until Acrobat 10's release to find out what Adobe has removed because our browser-based document review service is mission-critical. (More than 10,000 comments on 1100 documents this year, and more than 2600 comments in May alone.) "Shared reviews" are nice but they simply won't scale to our needs. Accordingly, I've been reimplementing the Collab object features that we need in a plug-in so that it can serve as a SOAP client to upload and download annots to and from our server.

Please be aware that plugins which implement network operations are likely to be affected by security changes in future releases and patches of Acrobat and Reader, as well as changes to browser and OS architecture (for example the roll-out of x64 and increasing use of tier-2 browsers such as Chrome and Opera) so using them to build back in a feature that has been removed is not necessarily a reliable plan.

Can you explain what it is about the Shared Review model that won't fit your needs?

You asked for it so here it is. You aren't the first Adobe person I've told this to, but so far it's fallen on deaf ears. [b][color=red]Can we continue to do all of this with Shared Reviews?[/color][/b]

During the past 5+ years, we developed a very extensive ASP.Net + SQL Server infrastructure that is built around "browser-based reviews," with the Collab object (i.e.. Collab.addAnnotStore, etc.) being the core on the client side. Annotations are uploaded and downloaded via SOAP to and from our web service and stored in a SQL database, which we subsequenly "mine" for a variety of purposes (e.g. export to Excel spreadsheets, government audits, etc. See below.).

Since 2006, 178 individual reviewers have used this document review service (DRS) to enter 90,377 comments on 8,549 documents. At the moment, we have 685 documents under review. During this past week alone, 29 reviewers entered 1374 comments on 369 documents. In other words, this has become a mission-critical service, and without it a [u]$4 billion[/u] construction project would screech to a halt. (That's not just me talking but the project managers.)

Our DRS includes a web-centric .Net application that allows a [u]single administrator[/u] to schedule reviews, "register" review documents, assign them to multi-phase review cycles, and assign reviewers, either individually or based on their membership in Active Directory groups. This allows [u]one person[/u] to register up to 5 or 6 documents [u]per minute.[/u] More importantly, this centralized document registration by a single administrator relieves the reviewers from this burden, which allows them to focus on [u]their[/u] job, which is reviewing documents. [b][color=red]Is that possible with Shared Reviews?[/color][/b]

As soon as the documents are registered, they appear on customized web pages for each reviewer (i.e. only the documents assigned to that reviewer are listed). No email notifications are needed. Reviewers click on a PDF icon next to a document, which opens the PDF in the browser and downloads all of the annotations. (That's the SOAP/Collab part.) We support all of the standard Acrobat markups (sticky notes, highlights, polygons, clouds, arrows, etc.); however, we also require that reviewers enter their comments through a dialog (created by a plug-in) that not only captures their textual comment but also captures additional structured metadata as well, such as "Reference" (i.e. the regulatory/spec basis for the comment), comment type ("Preference" or "Compliance"), error type ("Scriverner's Error," "Safety/Security," "Non-compliance to code," "Constructability," etc.), using dropdowns populated by the central server. If our plug-in discovers an "unformatted" comment (i.e. one not entered through the dialog), then it will block the upload with an error message to the reviewer. (Also please note that the PDFs are never downloaded to reviewer desktops.) [b][color=red]Is that possible with Shared Reviews?[/color][/b]

After the review phase has ended, senior editors use a web-centric .Net application to "disposition" (approve/disapprove) each reviewer comment. Editors select a document from a customized web page in a browser control built into the app. The PDF is opened and the annotations downloaded from the server (using SOAP/Collab). The editor then navigates from one annotation to the next by clicking an arrow button (which causes each selected annotation to change color so it can be easily found on the PDF) and approves/disapproves each annotation with a button click, and also enter an optional disposition comment. The app displays each textual comment, reviewer name, date entered, and other metadata on the left side of the UI; the PDF with all of the annotations are shown in the browser control on the right side. This application allows editors to "disposition" comments [u]very quickly[/u]. [b][color=red]Is that possible with Shared Reviews?[/color][/b]

After the comments have been dispositioned, the administrator creates new copies of the PDFs that contain [u]only[/u] the approved annotations, and she also exports the approved comments to an Excel spreadsheet, both of which are sent to the document authors (subcontractors) so they can make changes to the original document. Some subcontractors use a variant of the disposition application to enter their responses to each reviewer comment; others enter their responses directly into the spreadsheet, which we subsequently upload to our database. [b][color=red]Is that possible with Shared Reviews?[/color][/b]

Because all of this is captured in our SQL database, we have a [u]complete[/u] audit trail for each reviewer comment. We are in the nuclear industry, so this audit trail is [u]mandatory[/u] according to NQA (Nuclear Quality Assurance) regulations. [b][color=red]Is that possible with Shared Reviews?[/color][/b]

As I think you can see, the actual review process (entering comments and uploading to the server) is only a small fraction of our overall DRS, and SOAP/Collab does a wonderful job handling it. The rest of the DRS (about 90% of the code base) is built around the ability to upload/download each annotation to/from our web service. Without that feature, which Adobe in its wisdom has now deprecated, the DRS, which we painstakingly built over the past [u]five years,[/u] is [b][u][i]worthless.[/i][/u][/b]

We went down this path five years ago because we were convinced by Adobe and its propagandists (uhh, I mean "evangelists") of the great advantages of using SOAP for "browser-based reviews," which Adobe advocated in Acrobat 6, 7, and 8 -- http://livedocs.adobe.com/acrobat_sdk/9.1/Acrobat9_1_HTMLHelp/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=Acrobat9_HTMLHelp&file=Collab_ChoosingRepos.114.6.php. In other words, we drank the Adobe kool-aid. ([i]Fool me [u]once[/u][/i]...) Then, in Acrobat 9, Adobe deprecated it -- see note at the bottom of http://livedocs.adobe.com/acrobat_sdk/9.1/Acrobat9_1_HTMLHelp/Collab_Introduction.113.3.php .Now, I can understand Adobe deprecating features that are based on an obsolete or even outmoded technology, but SOAP is neither. Instead, Adobe's design decisions seem to be based on its inability to fix security problems in the Acrobat plug-in/Javascript [u]sandbox[/u]. Rather than getting its act together and fixing its own technology, Adobe has chosen instead to screw its customers by eliminating features that Adobe evangelized for several years (and through several Acrobat versions), features that customers came to rely upon. If I sound cynical then it's because I am.

If we can continue to do all of the above with Shared Reviews, then [u]great![/u] However, from what I've learned about "shared reviews" (no API, comments stored in each document on a network folder or Webdav server), we'd have to throw out this entire system and start over from scratch.

But why would we ever again devote resources to build another solution based on Adobe technology? [i]Fool me [u]twice[/u][/i].... I'm thinking Google: I'm fairly certain they'll come up with a web-centric "browser-based" review service. If so, then adios Adobe (and a lot more billable work for moi, so I shouldn't complain).

[b][color=red]Please tell me that I'm wrong.[/color][/b]

PS - Our DRS currently works with Chrome, so your concerns about this particular "tier-2" browser are, at the moment, moot.