(This article is an update to information originally published in January of 2007)

You have probably heard or seen, a new version of Acrobat has been available from Adobe.  We have held up the distribution of the new version until some testing was complete by the Business Offices.  We will be distributing the software soon, but we had to work around some obstacles that Adobe introduced with the latest release.

Concurrent licensing will no longer be available for Adobe Acrobat on supported ECN machines. Adobe's made some licensing changes last year, which eliminated concurrent licensing on the machines.  Every machine with Acrobat 8 will each have to have its own license. When we upgrade from Acrobat 7 licenses to Acrobat 8, we will not have enough licenses to install on every supported 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 we are using are not concurrent, we can no longer use a license manager to share our license pool as we have done in the past. The existing licenses in the pool were contributed to the pool by groups across Engineering. These groups now need to have their own installations of Acrobat 8. The existing licenses will be distributed to those users. ECN does not have funding to purchase a license for every supported machine in Engineering, and therefore can no longer provide these licenses centrally.

So, how are we (ECN) going to provide Acrobat for you? We are implementing the following options.

1. We are preparing Adobe Reader 8 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 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.