JD on EP

More, in this interview with Adobe staffer Randy Swineford from the Acrobat team:

In the same vein, there's an evolution of an existing feature -- combining files -- something you could do in Acrobat in several ways, such as dragging and dropping page thumbnails across panes. But it took many steps and was somewhat tedious. One of the goals for combining files was to give full control to the user. We've added capabilities -- you can now add an Excel spreadsheet and exclude worksheets that contain lots of data. With the current version, you'd have to delete those pages after combining. Now it's very easy to do as part of the combining process.

Or sometimes when you put a number of files together, the resulting file size is an issue. In Acrobat 8, we've added a simple option for quickly reducing file size when combining. Also, with the addition of the PDF Package technology, we solved the problem of combining a mix of PDFs with and without digital signatures. With the current method, when you'd do that, you'd destroy the digital signatures. We wanted a way to loosely couple assorted files together, which is very common in markets such as Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC). Different people sign off on certain documents within their own area of authority and then someone else has to sign off on the whole thing. With the PDF Package concept, you can take digitally signed files and put them together with other files, and even sign the entire package of content together.

Initially that was focused on some particular workflows, such as AEC, but when we showed it to other types of people, we realized it was resonating more widely. People need a way to package together different types of documents without changing the "bits" that made up those documents. We now have a way to have a very integrated viewing, printing and searching experience.

PDF Packaging is now also the output for e-mail archiving from Outlook and Lotus notes, which is really nice -- very similar to your e-mail Inbox. All of the columns are customized for e-mail and you have each message as an individual document, including the e-mail attachments. Additionally, with forms, all of the data gets aggregated back into a PDF Package.

PDF Packages is one of the things that in the future you'll see us evolve into more and different use cases and make it more customizable. People are driving us toward more of that. In the future we'll definitely invest more in the ability to customize PDF Packages for specific uses."