Sharing PDFs for commenting in Acrobat?

[Suma34]

Hello! I work for a monthly magazine. Last month, we were able to share PDFs online in Acrobat, invite writers and proofers to said PDFs, and have everyone commenting on/editing in the same PDF. Suddenly, this month, it seems that anyone who doesn't have a paid Adobe account can't access the PDFs. On my end, it looks like they're shared on the file (they've been invited, and the permissions say they can comment), but on their ends, they can't comment or see other comments. Did something change? We don't have the option of providing all of our freelance writers and proofers with Adobe subscriptions. Halp?

Not sure if this is at all related -- yesterday, I was unable to access ANY of my PDFs, like, from EVER until about 5 or 6 p.m. This made for a very stressful press day where a bunch of people had to redo work they'd done over the weekend. Not sure what happened yesterday (but interested to learn if anyone knows).

[Tariq Ahmad]

Hi @Carefree_help1346, 

Thanks for reaching out. Not all participants require Acrobat to participate in collaboration (commenting or markup); they can simply use the freeware tool Adobe Acrobat Reader. However, the person initiating the collaboration or sharing does require Adobe Acrobat access. Ask the initiator to check he/she has disabled the sharing. If sharing was done through the Acrobat app, not using any of your own storage(meaning where the file is hosted).

Yes, our services were impacted due to the AWS outage. If you have a business account and you are still experiencing the issue, ask your admin to open a support ticket via Adobe admin console. 

Best regards,
Tariq | Adobe Community Team

[Suma34]

I am logged into a paid account. I have tried to share the PDFs a number of different ways with our flatreaders today. Via the gmail link, inviting directly, and email a link separately. It SAYS it is sharing with them, but then it doesn't show them as shared, and they still can't access. This has made the last few days so very difficult! Is there another thing we can try? We rely on this system.

[Suma34]

Also, when I try to change the settings to "allow anyone with the link" to access (as a last-ditch effort), it keeps letting me click "allow" but then it doesn't actually change the setting. My internet connection is strong.

[billyn]

Same here.

[billyn]

My company will log a ticket as well. We're at a critical time in our projects and expericing this same issue.

[Suma34]

Yes, this is insane! Several people have spent HOURS trying to work this out today. If Adobe is having trouble because of the outages, WHY NOT LET EVERYONE KNOW so we don't WASTE EVERYONE'S time?? Our magazine goes to press tonight and now it's HOURS behind schedule. 

Relatedly, does anyone know of a good way to collaborate on PDFs without using Adobe products?

[billyn]

Turns out we weren't able to log a ticket with Adobe at all yesterday, my IT dept. called and said Adobe's biz ticketing system wasn't functioning and timed out when they tried it. 

Did you manage to get a ticket in and/or how is PDF proofing treating you today @Suma34 ?

[Suma34]

Thanks for checking in and WOOF!

We could not log a ticket. We gave up on collaborative proofing and went back to our old way of having a human manually combine everyone's edits into one PDF. That was our last press day for this issue, so we're keeping a wide berth from Adobe, at least for the next couple of weeks! Meantime, we're looking for other systems. Let me know if you have/find any, and vice versa!

Are you still wrestling with Adobe today? Any better?

[billyn]

We did similar, back to physical proofing basically.

I'm not relaly familiar with any other system, but it'd be nice. Anything online supported could not avoid an AWS inflicted system. It would have to be local area only, which I have seen before, but that was 10 years ago and I knew nothing about the nuts and bolts.

I've done some light Document Cloud+PDF commenting testing today and it seems stable, but I'm more amazed that Adobe has said nothing and their server status page continues to say all green for the Document Cloud services.