You have probably heard or seen, there is a new version of Acrobat 8 available from Adobe. You might be wondering when ECN will have it available for you to use on our Windows computers. We are working on the issues and hope to start distributing the software soon, but Adobe has introduced some major obstacles with the latest release.

The most significant problem is that Adobe has eliminated concurrent licensing for Acrobat 8. ECN has used concurrent licensing for the past several versions of Acrobat to provide a small pool of licenses to a large number of machines. We have a pool of about 35 licenses which we have been able to share with 2000 or so machines.

There is also a new wrinkle introduced by Adobe with Acrobat 8. Each license now requires authorization. If a computer has been authorized for Acrobat, and loses a hard drive or is reformatted without deauthorization, we will lose that license. It is not clear at this point how much effort will be involved to get the license back from Adobe. This means that if you purchase and authorize your own copy of Acrobat through Adobe, ECN cannot help you if there are problems with your license. ECN is working to provide a local authorization server, which can tie a purchased license to your computer.

Because of Adobe's new policies concerning licensing of Acrobat, machines with Acrobat 8 will each have to have their own license and be authorized. When we convert our Acrobat 7 licenses to Acrobat 8, we will not have enough licenses to install on every machine in ECN. We cannot upgrade to Acrobat 8 licenses and also maintain our old Acrobat 7 licenses. This would put us in violation of our license agreement.

Because the new licenses are not concurrent, we can no longer use a license manager to share our license pool as we have done in the past. Many of the licenses in the pool were purchased by individuals who will now need to have their own installation of Acrobat 8. The existing licenses will be distributed to those users. We do not have funding to purchase a license for every machine in ECN, and therefore can no longer provide these licenses centrally.

So, how are we (ECN) going to provide Acrobat for you? There are a couple of ideas we are working to implement.

1. We are preparing Acrobat 8 Reader to be distributed to the computers of ECN. This will allow you to read any existing or new Acrobat Documents.
2. We are distributing PDFCreator. This software will act like a printer driver to provide you with 'BASIC' PDF creation.
3. We are preparing a link to the ITAP GoRemote Servers, where you will be able to access the full version of Acrobat to create and edit advanced PDF documents.

This combination should fulfill most of your needs. If you need a full version of Acrobat on your system, it is likely that you will need to purchase your own license if you have not done so already. If you need a license, contact your site specialist, so it can be coordinated through ECN.