We are refreshing some department computers with newer models through Dell. These new computers come with Adobe Acrobat X Std on them. This works fine for most people until today. Our one department had their older XP computers replaced with new Win 7 machines and Adobe Acrobat X standard. They were dependant on a feature to right click on a bunch of PDFs and combine them. They need the portfolio option because a regular combine will overwrite values in forms because "they have the same name". This worked fine on the OLD machines with Adobe 9.5 Standard.
So on the new computers with Acrobat X Standard, this portfolio option is gone! This is needed for their job!
Now I am scrambling to deactivate and uninstall X standard from the new computers ,and deactivate and uninstall 9.5 from the old ones. Using Belarc Advisor to obtain the product key, I can reinstall it on the new computers, along with running all the umpteen patches to get 9.0 back up to the latest version. Not only that but the right click context menu is gone, so I had to research that and find the command to get it back -> regsvr32 "C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat Elements\ContextMenu64.dll"
After doing some research it seems you have to spend extra money on a X or XI "professional" version, just to get a feature that was included in 9 STANDARD. Shopping around the best price I could find was over at NewEgg for $120. Multiple that by the people who need it, were looking at good amount of money to get back a single feature we had before!
So were going right back to Acrobat 9 standard because it does what we need it to do. My plea to adobe is to bring back the portfolio feature! Either that or don't screw up the contents of forms in a standard combine!
Is this the latest trend that new versions of software are designed to take away features or functionality that people depend on? I mean even Windows 8 takes away the start menu (I know there's freeware to get it back). Please don't stoop to Microsoft's level and remove thign's people depend on.
