Civica Services has worked closelywith Adobe since 1994 and are one of a select band of authorised Adobe Education Centres which enable us to provide particularly attractive licensing prices to all educational institutions for all core Adobe products.

Founded in 1982, Adobe Systems Incorporated provides award-winning Network Publishing solutions that help enterprises, creative professionals, and home and business users make visually rich information reliably available to anyone, anywhere, on virtually any device.

Adobe Acrobat 8 targets 'Knowledge Workers', this is Adobe 'marketing speak' for business professionals who consume, analyse or produce high value documents and need to work with colleagues using this information. With Acrobat, Adobe provides these individuals a set of capabilities to communicate and collaborate with confidence, regardless of boundaries, like what type of computer or software an extended team might be using.

At first glance, the completely refreshed user interface of Acrobat 8 has been simplified, yet it will remain familiar to existing users. The engineers have been able to take a big step forward whilst carefully considering the needs of Acrobat's 22 million users who don't want to learn and acclimatise to a whole new application.

Fundamentally, the application has moved from presenting a range of tools towards helping users with their task at hand. The direction for the engineering team was to develop a range of high value workflow capabilities that addressed the needs of a broad range of business. One such capability that has received considerable customer input, especially in Legal and Government organisations following the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act, has been the introduction of a complete 'Redaction 'toolset. 'Redaction' is the equivalent of using Tip-ex or a black marker over content in a paper document that you do not wish to share and then photocopying it before it's shared with the recipients. Unfortunatelyin the electronic document world, most applications have a habit of not only retaining the text that you hide but also a hidden history including everything that has been changed or edited in the document, who did it and when. 'Redaction' is the only surefire way to help you remove both the visible and invisible information you don't want to share.

One other area that makes managing information a whole lot easier is the development made to building and processing electronic forms. Perhaps the most remarkable of which is artificial intelligence used to accurately place form fields on what was previously just a static page. You can scan or import an existing paper or dumb form and then ask Acrobat to automatically search out the lines or spaces where the form fields need to be placed, ready to key in the information. Acrobat also makes it easy to collate completed forms and combine the results into fully formatted spreadsheet. For the IT department, Adobe has developed additional features so that organisations can better manage and control their deployment of Acrobat with accurate inventories of what has been installed on the network.

• It enables people to reliably and securely communicate a whole range of documents and information including e-mail, web pages and turn paper into digital documents.

• You can bring together a whole range of content from many different sources into a single polished document so that it's more effective and can be more easily consumed.

• It simplifies the collection of data from forms such as expense claims, surveys and enrolment and collates the information into a consolidated spreadsheet.

• It gets the whole team on the same page by enabling them to simultaneously review, mark-up and approve documents and designs. Everyone's feedback is visible to every participant. As a result, work gets done faster and more accurately. One of the great new features of Acrobat is its tight integration with Microsoft SharePoint Server products.

• And perhaps most importantly is the ability to secure who can see and do what with your information. It's in this area that Acrobat has become a critical application for many organisations wanting to protect intellectual property or ensure the confidentiality of documents.