Adobe update: time will tell

The delay of Adobe Day at Grants.gov signaled a larger delay in the deployment of the Adobe Acrobat Forms. This was confirmed during the May FDP, which I attended.

Conversations with a wide variety of sources and a hands-on drive of the Adobe NIH R01 form set indicates several problems. Certainly there were a lot of solvable bugs, which would be anticipated in a pre-alpha release. Others look difficult. The 3 major areas of concern (shared among us). I’ll handle each of these in turn.

Slowness: As it currently stands, Adobe is slow. In testing the application on a fast Macbook Pro and a fast PC with the Acrobat forms navigation window open, it took 55 seconds per form to move from the left window to the right window. Moving between forms takes some more time. Saving the proposal is fairly slow. The in-form calculation and movement within a form are acceptably fast. It is unclear what performance optimizations will be available to the development team given that Adobe is a well developed product at this point.

Form in Forms: Adobe Acrobat does support attaching other adobe PDF documents. Adobe does not allow data within a PDF form to pass through to the data in another PDF form it is attached to. This is a problem for Sub-contract budgets. It also could be an intractable problem.

Adobe is like PureEdge, sorta: While this may not seem like a big deal, there is general agreement that PureEdge is fairly pedestrian in its design (look/feel/interface). The Adobe interface was required by Grants.gov to look and behave (for the most part) exactly like PureEdge. There was an opportunity to make the interface better, but that has probably passed to the technology that will replace Adobe sometime in the future.

Adobe Day to come: Speculation at the FDP was that it would be a while before we would see a re-scheduled Adobe day. The Federal Agencies we talked to said, in essence, that Grants.gov couldn’t get the software to work so they killed the demonstration. Lord knows they have a very complicated system to build. Standby for further information from Grants.gov.