SAN JOSE, Calif.--July 15, 2003-- Adobe Systems Incorporated, the leader in network publishing, today announced new graphical design software for creating intelligent electronic documents. Leveraging the power of PDF for presenting information and XML for processing data, the new form design software will enable organizations to easily design and deploy intelligent forms in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) or in an XML Data Package (XDP). Combined with Adobe's server solutions, now customers in industries such as financial services, manufacturing and governments worldwide can leverage their current infrastructure, knowledge and investment in applications to connect people and processes across the extended enterprise. The new XML/PDF form designer software builds on Adobe's XML architecture (see news release dated April 7, 2003) that supports end-to-end document processes. It provides all the capabilities needed to design forms with precision, including the ability to easily define business logic and incorporate existing or user-defined XML schemas. By enabling form designers to include user-defined XML schemas they can use XML vocabularies specific to particular verticals or cross-industry standards. Forms can be deployed in PDF and then processed as PDF is today, or delivered as an XML Data Package (XDP) to be processed as XML. XDP files are simply XML files that contain XML form data, XML form templates, PDF documents and other XML information. They can be easily integrated with enterprise applications via commonly available XML tools and web services. "Thanks to XML, the distinction between enterprise documents and enterprise forms has irreversibly blurred," said Tim Hickernell, vice president META Group. "By leveraging the power of XML to build more intelligent documents, companies are now challenged to design enterprise forms that are flexible enough to allow maximum reuse of corporate data across enterprise systems, as well as across traditional enterprise documents." From internal facing forms, such as purchase orders and expense reports, to reaching customers and partners with forms such as applications and request for proposals, Adobe's solutions help enterprises streamline internal operations and improve customer service. The new form designer, combined with the Adobe Form Server, Adobe Workflow Server, Adobe Document Server and the free Adobe Reader, will enable organizations to integrate enterprise applications with document workflows throughout an organization, improving document generation, collaboration and process management. For example, a financial institution can make loan applications available online. Anyone with the free Reader software can download the form, fill it in offline, and electronically submit the application back to the institution. Because the data in the application is submitted as XML, it can be integrated directly into the existing loan processing system. With more than half-a-billion copies of the Adobe Reader distributed to date, companies can more easily enable virtually anyone to participate in business processes across a wide variety of platforms, applications and devices. "Until now, organizations have been struggling with integrating data and documents into business processes to effectively and efficiently manage information flow," said Ivan Koon, senior vice president, ePaper Business Unit at Adobe. "The new form design software will give our customers the power and flexibility to create sophisticated, intelligent forms that capture business critical information for enterprise systems, while ensuring that the information can be shared or reused in business processes inside and outside the firewall." The new form designer will be available for beta testing during Q4 2003. For more information regarding the XML/PDF form designer, Adobe's XML architecture specification, intelligent documents and form samples, please visit www.adobe.com/enterprise/xml.html.