Flash being phased out? / PDF portfolios

[gwenm83612513]

We have a question about the long-term support of Flash as it relates to our PDFs.  We are currently using Outlook to create large files of multiple emails with an index at the top to browse through the PDFs.  This is not usable on all of our machines - some running ProDC and some running Acrobat X - and we've been told it's a flash problem.  Updating Flash on the machine in question does solve it for the time being, but our IT has told us that Flash is being phased out.

Our questions are:

1. Is Flash being phased out in the foreseeable future?

2. If so, will that render our archived files unusable?

Thank you.

[chris.campbell]

We have no plans to stop our development of Flash Player.  Our team will continue to update Flash on a regular (monthly) basis with security, bug and functional updates.

[jeromiec83223024]

This is really a better question for the Acrobat folks, particularly around best practices for IT deployment in an enterprise environment that would ensure consistent behavior across your organization.

What it sounds like to me, is that Acrobat requires that the NPAPI variant of Flash Player to be installed on the client system in order to play Flash based content in SWFs; however, the NPAPI Flash Player is not consistently deployed across your machines. 

For the systems that can't view the Portfolio, they probably need to install the NPAPI variant of Flash Player.

You can find more details here:

Adobe Reader and Acrobat Flash Player Download for Windows

Also, we provide a number of methods by which your IT staff can manage and deploy Flash Player across the organization.  I've included links to our system administration guide and to the free distribution license agreement.

Adobe Flash Player Administration Guide for Flash Player | Adobe Developer Connection

Adobe Flash Player Distribution | Adobe

[gwenm83612513]

Thank you for the replies.  So is it your opinion that our archived files will continue to be accessible for the foreseeable future?

[jeromiec83223024]

In the near-term, yes.  If you asked me what things look like in 2027 or 2037, I have no idea.

There *are* people on Acrobat that are focused on long-term archival issues, and it's an important topic.  It's *way* outside of my area of expertise, and I didn't realize that it was even a thing that people worked on until it came up in passing the other day.

If your organization has an enterprise support agreement with Adobe, this is a great conversation to have with your support rep to see if they might have some advice tailored to your specific situation. 

If not, you might want to strike up a conversation on the Acrobat message boards around best practices for long-term archival and compatibility, to see if they have any advice.  One option might be to add a post-processing step where you break out very simplistic versions of the final documents for long-term archival at the point that the documents are no longer actively worked on (and this might imply adding the right metadata to ensure efficient discovery, etc), but continue to leverage the robust features for productivity and ease of use while those documents are actively in use.

We don't have visibility into what changes are going to happen over the span of the next few decades, but if you have serious long-term archival needs on those timescales, it would definitely serve you well to have a concrete set of plans and standards for your organization, and a pragmatic approach that prefers simplicity on that front will probably serve you well over the long-term.

[MICHELEBELLA]

We recently upgraded to Pro 17.  Noticing now that one of the major features we use very very often, PDF Portfolio, have been turned off.  We previously created a PDF Portfolio layout specific to our business and added files to the Portfolio for emailing to our clients.  Under this new version, we are able to access the PDF Portfolio that has our layout, but we are unable to edit the layout (i.e. the text) or make changes to any of the files entered into the portfolio - move the files around, change the name of the files being attached.

If we are unable to use a layout that was created on an older version, is there a way to create a new layout on the new version?  Or is there a program we can download?  We need to create a custom back drop to the PDF that has our firm's logo and all the files nicely formatted for them to open.

[jeromiec83223024]

I'm going to move this thread into the Acrobat forums, since they're going to be far more familiar with their product.

[Test Screen Name]

I believe we now have a death date for Flash of 2020, could be sooner.