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So, what is wrong about sponsoring
Sponsoring? What is sponsoring?
In this context, "sponsoring" means that _you_ as provider of the forms sponsor a "better" version of the Acrobat viewer to your users.
Acrobat 6 Standard?
Most people can not rationalize $300 for Acrobat Standard when all they want is the ability to Save the form that they've just filled out for someone else's use. Adobe has purposefully created Acrobat as an industry standard for document viewing. Now that governments are offering forms ready to be filled out on their web sites, it is only reasonable that the average citizen filling out the form should be able to Save their work so as to be able to complete the form later, or to perhaps have an electronic copy of what they submitted. And this average citizen should not now have to pay $300 for that privilege.
That's why I am talking about "sponsoring". It is _you_ who wants something from your users, and therefore, you are essentially responsible to make sure that you get it in a way that it suits you. You will always have to compare things with plain old paper.
Another thing you have to keep in mind, the whole discussion about Extended Rights got reduced to "local saving". You can do local saving with Reader, but you will have to help Reader to do so. You always can set up the forms that they submit their data to a webserver (and it does not matter which IP number this server has (did I hear 127.0.0.1?), which takes care of the rest (for example by filling out the form on itself and sending the filled out form back to the client, or by sending back an FDF which then can be written to disk.
There are other features which are also covered with the Extended Rights. These are "Commenting" and "Digital Signatures". For the first one, you can make up your document for commenting, either from within the document, or by providing a separate web form.
Digital Signatures are a completely different beast. In order to get legally Digital Signatures working in a General Public environment, you will have to set up and provide quite a bit of infrastructure. And in such a case, you are talking more money anyway, so that the licence for the Adobe Document Server for Reader Extension, or Acrobat Standard in bulk, or even Approval in bulk becomes a minor part of your total project cost. On the other hand, you will get considerable benefits from a fully electronic workflow, which will be either savings, or speed-improvements, or quality improvements (well, consider all of the above...). And that will lead to amazingly short payback times.
or what is wrong about sponsoring Approval?
Approval does not show in the Acrobat Family product line. <http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/main.html> Is there something that I am missing? I am seeing Adobe being very close to being able to say that they had to discontinue it due to poor sales.
Approval is available. It is not mentioned in the Acrobat product line, because it is not supporting Acrobat 6 features (and -- understandably -- Adobe does not want to show "old" stuff in their product list. As it has been mentioned elsewhere, Approval appears in the Adobe Store. And it is available in bulk.
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