Spyware Sucks

I encountered an interesting site recently - imagine this - a supposedly "professional" IT company installed an off-the-shelf copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional on a terminal server for use by over 20 people, and then registered the copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional using a single user licence key.  Adobe's programme was not intelligent enough to realise it was being used in a Terminal Server environment by 20+ users.  I continue to be amazed at how *unethical* IT companies can be.  I would flatly refuse to do such a thing.

Anyway, we had to 'legalise' the situation.  Adobe charges a ridiculous amount for Adobe Acrobat Professional - nearly AUD$700 per seat - ok, so I can understand why the IT company did what it did, when such large amounts of money are involved, but damn it, you don't do it - the licences are paid for, or my clients don't get the software. End of story.

Anyway, we went looking for alternatives and found something very promising - NitroPDF - available at http://www.nitropdf.com   - which is charging roughly AUD$120 per seat - that is one hell of a price difference.

So far NitroPDF is doing everything that I want it to do, apart from some unusual behaviour with file type associations that is breaking the product's integration with Worldox (http://www.worldox.com/) within the Worldox shell itself, but we're working through that.

So far Nitro is faster, smaller and MUCH cheaper, and they have been very responsive in my efforts to get Nitro and Worldox to play together nicely.  And, I mean *fast*.  I can convert a document that is hundreds of pages long from Word to PDF format in seconds with hardly any effect on system resources ... when using Adobe Acrobat the hit on system resources was obvious, and it took at least 3 times as long.

Loading the programme itself is markedly faster with Nitro than with Adobe.

The only deficiency that I have found so far, apart from the weird file type association problem, is that if you convert a Word document to PDF using the Nitro Toolbar (instead of file, print to Nitro PDF, select 'document showing markup'), tracked revisions are not preserved - an essential component of many legal documents.  That being said, the cost savings are so immense I'm quite happy to accept the retraining of staff and the extra step or two it takes to email a PDF document with tracked revisions preserved.

I think I can say that Adobe Acrobat Professional have lost a sale with me.  As NitroPDF becomes more well known, and as we work through the Worldox integration problems (I'll share what I can about them) I think that Nitro will grab a larger and larger foothold over time, and slowly take more market share away from the behemeth that is Adobe.

The file type associations do seem to be unusual - perhaps one of my readers can explain them.

A "normal" HKCR entry looks like this:

Key Name:          HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.hta
Class Name:        <NO CLASS>
Last Write Time:   8/10/2004 - 2:33 AM
Value 0
  Name:            <NO NAME>
  Type:            REG_SZ
  Data:            htafile

Value 1
  Name:            Content Type
  Type:            REG_SZ
  Data:            application/hta

The PDF entry looks like this: