Adobe today announced enhanced integration with Microsoft Office 365 that will give access to Adobe PDF services from directly from the ribbon bar within the online versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint, as well as from within SharePoint and OneDrive.
Adobe also announced enhancements to its free Adobe Scan app for iOS and Android devices so that the app not only scans images of business cards, but also turns them into shareable digital contacts.
In a third announcement today, Adobe said it is rolling out deeper integration between Adobe Sign, its digital signature product, and Microsoft Dynamics, a retail sales and management platform that is not widely used in the legal industry, if at all.
The deeper integration with Office 365 comes as part of an increasingly close relationship between Adobe and Microsoft. It will allow users to access Adobe PDF services directly from the ribbon of Office online.
Once you install the Adobe add-in to Office 365, it allows you to convert an open document to PDF by clicking the Adobe button on the ribbon bar. Once converted, you can save the PDF to OneDrive or Document Cloud, or download it. It works with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but only with Office online.
In addition, users can create Adobe PDFs from multiple files in SharePoint and OneDrive, will the ability to delete, reorder or rotate PDF pages and to search inside PDFs.
With regard to scanning business cards, the free Adobe Scan app will now both save an image of the card and also extract its text and allow you to save the information to your contacts. In the earlier version of the app, which I reviewed last year, it OCR’d the text of anything it scanned, but only to make it searchable. Now it takes that a step further for business cards by putting the extracted information into a contact.
Using Adobe’s AI-powered image-correcting software Adobe Sensei, Adobe Scan detects the card’s borders, corrects skewed perspectives, adjusts lighting and shadows, and performs OCR to extract the text. Click “Save Contact” to save the person’s name, company, phone number, email address and an image of the card to your contacts. The ability of the app to scan in low-light or poor-light conditions has been enhanced in this release, Adobe says.
The app is free, but users who have an Adobe Cloud account will be able to do more with it, including store scans in Adobe Cloud.
The integration with SharePoint and OneDrive enables you to avoid steps. Instead of having to download files from in order to combine them into a PDF, you can do it directly from within SharePoint and OneDrive.
To use these features, you will have to have subscriptions to both an enterprise version of Office 365 and Adobe Document Cloud.
You will also need to install the add-in. Instructions on how to do that can be found here.