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In 2008, a UK-based Adobe Acrobat engineer remarked, "I believe in striving to minimize the use of paper, but I do believe that we will probably never reach a position where paper is eliminated from our workplaces." This morning, his predictions were clearly confirmed by a study published by the information professionals organization AIIM.

The study shows that while the exchange of PDF files as e-mail attachments has reduced the volume of paperwork traded between IT professionals, that reduction is not only minimal, but quite possibly made up for. Over three-quarters of IT professionals surveyed say one of the first things they do with a PDF-based invoice... is print it out.

Adobe isn't a company that's typically thought of as an "enterprise software company," even though it sells its software to large enterprises and offers "enterprisey" products like Acrobat and LiveCycle. That could be changing.

Atlassian recently said it wants to be for technical teams what Adobe is to designers, but it's clear that Adobe wants to be to technical teams what it is to designers. Adobe announced several new products at its annual Max conference, including LiveCycle Mobile, the new BlackBerry SDK, HTML5 tools and its app distribution system InMarket. What's emerging is a full "Adobe Stack" for the enterprise.

Adobe's online office suite, Acrobat.com, is getting its first major upgrade since the service left beta back in June of this year. The new release, launching tomorrow, is an entirely unified experience thanks to the addition of a much-requested file organization tool, explains the service's Director of Project Management Rick Treitman.

Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com's smartphone application, users won't just have access to their files on the go - they can also scan in new documents with their phone's camera.

Today, Adobe announced that their online office suite at Acrobat.com is moving out of beta and they will begin offering both free and paid subscriptions to the web-based suite of applications. For consumers, the change won't have that much of an impact since the core services at Acrobat.com will remain free: Buzzword (the word processor), Presentations (slideshows, still in beta), and Tables (spreadsheets, new today). However, business users will now face a dilemma as Adobe begins to charge for PDF conversion as well as their web meetings product, Adobe ConnectNow.

FoxIt Software, makers of the popular free alternative PDF reader, FoxIt Reader, announced patches for three public vulnerabilities that were discovered in the past few weeks. With all the press attention focused on Adobe's Acrobat PDF reader, it may have gone somewhat overlooked that FoxIt Reader also had some weaknesses. In this case, FoxIt has managed to get the jump on Adobe as well, releasing their patches first.

Back in March, we said Adobe was slowly building an online empire. Today, that news turns out to be true. Adobe is has just launched their version of an online office suite available at Acrobat.com, complete with word processor (Buzzword), web conferencing/whiteboard app (ConnectNow), online file sharing (Share), file storage, (My Files), and PDF converter. To complement this launch, Adobe has also announced a brand-new version of Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat 9, the biggest release since the initial one that introduced Acrobat to the world. The remarkable change in this new version is that Adobe is now incorporating Flash into the PDF experience.