Microsoft Teams is finally solving your most annoying PDF problem
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Worrying about PDF files on Microsoft Teams should be a thing of the past soon after the collaboration tool launches a new built-in integration with Adobe Acrobatenabling group access to documents directly from the app.
In a after (opens in new tab)on the Microsoft Teams blog, the company announced that Acrobat can now be set as the default app to open PDFs in Teams, with features such as collaborative sharing and review, comments and annotations, and access to PDFs stored in Microsoft Sharepoint and OneDrive .
The change requires an organization’s IT admin to set Acrobat as the default PDF app in the Teams admin center, with Microsoft providing a guide (opens in new tab) to set the function. From there, all PDF files sent from individual chats and group channels will benefit from the change.
Adobe Acrobat in Teams
All Teams users will benefit from the basic version of Acrobat PDF reader functionality, but requires an Acrobat Standard or Pro account to add comments, export, and transfer to other file types, compress and password protect PDFs.
Microsoft was also keen to point out that PDFs collaborated using Acrobat are temporarily sent to Adobe Document Cloud servers for encryption and then deleted from those servers after twenty-four hours.
Adobe, for its part, has one white paper (opens in new tab) discussing the security practices that apply to the Document Cloud services. There it claims that the visibility of documents sent to the cloud is already set to “private”, meaning only users who have collaborated on a document can view it, and any external sharing actions must be taken by those users .
This is not the first collaboration between Microsoft and Adobe. The Adobe Acrobat Sign feature, which allows authentic “e-signatures” to be printed on documents, has already been made available as add-ins for Microsoft 365, Teams, and SharePoint.
In the future, Adobe will offer “Live Sign” within Acrobat Sign In for teams, which it hopes will provide a “real-time signing experience” without the need to meet in person.