Kjartan Mannes

The new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 doesn't seem to be too popular in the blogging world. Sven wrote a rather negative review on his blog Quarter Life Crisis. (Found the link via Scott and Jeremy.)
There is another area I don't think Adobe is getting right either, and the marketing of their full version of Adobe Acrobat, which oddly enough didn't get a name change. In the USA Adobe Acrobat Standard costs $299 and the Professional edition is $449. I've just started a project at work where we are going to use PDF for our more formal documents we send out, so we need about 100 licenses for our user base (whom are mostly clue less). What we want is the PDF Writer part of Adobe Acrobat to convert MS Word or Excel files into PDF. The only problem is that 100 licenses of Acrobat Standard is $29900. That is a lot of cash for a virtual printer that can convert anything into PDF. You just print to it and specify where you want to store the PDF.
Granted, Adobe does have a product called Adobe Acrobat Elements, that is basically just the printer but "is available only through licensing with a minimum of 1,000 seats per order", which is a tad to much for our needs, or most companies in Norway for that matter.
So I was looking around for an alternative and someone suggested Win2PDF which is basically just the printer component and costs $35 for the basic version and $69 for the Pro version. I got a recommendation from a friend who works in a law firm that just installed Win2PDF for their 200+ users. Several of the larger ASPs in Norway are also offering it to their customers. The major reason for this is that for one its a lot cheaper, and really simple to use.
Most companies do not need the full power of Adobe Acrobat 6.0. Most of the features in Adobe Acrobat 5 use terms that no normal mortal comprehends (DocBox, Distiller, TouchUp, JavaScript, etc). I give that to any user that barely understands Word and I've increased the support load. Even if you show users the simple way to do things they inevitably click their way into some obscure part of the program causing them to scream for help and refusing to perform the operation again by making someone more technical do it for them.
So next week I am going to run a test of Win2PDF and see how it works, and will most likely choose it over Adobe Acrobat.