Tired of Acrobat licensing expenses? Replace Acrobat with LibreOffice Draw and edit PDFs for free

Are you tired of your software budget evaporating on questionable licensing expenses like Acrobat Standard?  Do you wish you could recover that cost or redirect it into something more useful?  In that case, have you considered the freely available LibreOffice Draw ?

For the unacquainted, LibreOffice is an open source office productivity platform first released under the LGPL in January 2011 by The Document Foundation.  You may recall, that Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010, and along with that they inherited OpenOffice, and abruptly killed commercial support for it (trivia - Sun released it as an OpenSource project after acquiring StarOffice in 1999).  The net result, is that LibreOffice (which is actively being developed) is actually quite a a mature, open source office productivity platform - and is similar to Microsoft Office in many respects.  Notably, LibreOffice Draw (akin to Visio) has the ability to edit PDFs.  No, not like Microsoft Office, which let's you create in Office and then do a Save As to PDF.  LibreOffice Draw literally lets you do a File>Open... browse  to your PDF...  then modify the content.  And it works... when you're finished, go to File>Export as PDF>Export.  And boom... you're finished.  You can even install the portableapps.com package - which I use for editing PDFs.

This isn't to say that you can just blindly replace every instance of Acrobat Standard, or Professional across your organization.  That would be unwise.  But if you think about your user or client base, and thelicensing expense line items in your budget, how many of your resources just need a simple PDF editor?  How many  couldn't care less about all of the other features of Acrobat Standard and Professional? 

Given the actual need and your budget, give LibreOffice Draw a try, and see if you really need all of those Acrobat Standard licenses.

Lotus Symphony: Free is Good, but familiar is better

With the Lotus Symphony announcement, we have another Office suite to offer our SMB clients. Having more options is always good. Unfortunately in the past - the "freeness" of OpenOffice, or Google apps - hasn't really caught on among our clients. I don't know if it's because Google apps are so inconsistent in terms of look-and-feel (today we can do X, but tomorrow X is gone), or if it's because OpenOffice has some perception issues - but everyone seems to choose some version of Microsoft office.

Moving forward hopefully that will change. But for now at least - the takeaway seems to be that free is good, but familiar is better.

Office: Office 2007 Save As PDF

Save as PDF in Office 2007... I installed this add-on a while back and have been using it constantly. So now, instead of using only PDFCreator, Microsoft Office 2007 has an Add-In that will let you save directly to either PDF or XPS. Nice.