For Immediate Release:

CENSA Assists Adobe Systems In Development Of Key Features
In Acrobat 4.0 Software

Medford, Mass., June 15, 1999 - Fully electronic notebooks and reliable digital record keeping have been on the needs list of corporations since the first computers were invented decades ago. It's a need that CENSA, The Collaborative Electronic Network Systems Association, is working hard to fulfill. As a global software and high-technology market development association, CENSA collaborates with business users and such industry leaders as Adobe Systems to ensure that new products deliver the features that corporations need most.

"We identified early on that digital signatures and the ability to date and time stamp files were critical for sharing, reusing, and archiving R&D information," says Rich Lysakowski, Ph.D., Executive Director of CENSA. "Our work with Adobe on Acrobat 4.0 focused heavily on helping to ensure that these important features were integrated into the software."

With input from CENSA, the Adobe Acrobat 4.0 development team worked to incorporate a wide range of capabilities that further enhance the value of Acrobat and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) to an organization. The latest version of Acrobat not only supports digital signatures and date and time stamping, but also offers such features as Web site Capture and Archive, which allows anyone to take perfect snapshots of entire Web sites. The Web site or individual Web pages contain all the graphics, hyperlinks, and text in highly compressed PDF files that users can save to their desktop systems or laptop computers. The Web site can then be browsed offline or archived for future reference.

"Acrobat 4.0 is a breakthrough," Lysakowski says. "It brings corporations closer to being able to use computers for every aspect of creating and storing permanent, authentic electronic records."

CENSA represents business users across many industries, including pharmaceutical, biotechnology, healthcare, and high technology. In each of these markets, the ability to maintain detailed records and reports on patents is critical, both for competitive and legal reasons. Traditionally, corporations have relied on a combination of paper and microfilm to archive this information. Adobe Acrobat 4.0, in contrast, delivers a platform-and application-independent file format that offers the benefits of paper-ease of use, widespread availability, and ability to convey information exactly as intended- with the speed and efficiency of technology.

New technologies for digital record keeping are only effective if they provide a solid foundation to support future workflow. Legal and patent records, for example, have to be just as easy to access 20 years from now as they are today. Adobe's commitment to "backwards compatibility" - documents that are created today can be accessed effortlessly tomorrow - is key to making fully electronic recordkeeping a reality. "One of the biggest problems with materials authored in different software applications is incompatibility across vendors and systems, and over time," Lysakowski explains. "Adobe Acrobat and PDF eliminate these problems."

Adobe joined CENSA nearly a year ago as a Supplier Member. Since then, the association has worked closely with the company on a number of projects. "CENSA's input during the development of Acrobat 4.0 was critical," says Joe Eschbach, vice president at Adobe Systems Incorporated. "By aligning ourselves with CENSA, we move closer to our customers and can bring the right products with the right features to market faster."

CENSA assists its end user and supplier members in constructing systems applications and tools for mission-critical R&D automation systems. The association represents more than 50,000 R&D scientists and engineers and more than 500,000 employees worldwide in the pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology, healthcare, software, and high technology industries, where government regulations and patents are fundamental to business operations.

Contact

Dr. Rich Lysakowski
Executive Director
CENSA
Phone: (781) 395-3004
Email:

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CENSA is a registered trademark of Collaborative Electronic Notebook Systems Association. Adobe and Adobe Acrobat are trademarks of Adobe Systems, Inc. All other products and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.