Microsoft Teams is finally solving your most annoying PDF problem

by DTM | Posted on

Worrying about PDF files on Microsoft Teams should soon be a thing of the past after the collaboration tool launched new in-built integration with Adobe Acrobat, allowing for easy group access to documents directly within the app.

In a post on the Microsoft Teams Blog, the company announced that Acrobat can now be set as the default app to open PDFs in Teams, offering features such as collaborative sharing and reviewing, comments and annotations, and access to PDFs stored across Microsoft Sharepoint and OneDrive.

The change will require an organization’s IT admin to set Acrobat as the default PDF app within the Teams admin center, with Microsoft publishing a guide to set up the feature. 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 Acrobat’s basic PDF reader functionality, but will need an Acrobat Standard or Pro account to add comments, export and convert to other file types, compress and password protect PDFs.

Microsoft was also keen to point out that PDFs that are collaborated on using Acrobat are sent, temporarily, to Adobe Document Cloud servers for encryption, and then deleted from those servers after twenty-four hours. 

Adobe, for its part, has published a white paper discussing the security procedures that govern its Document Cloud services. There, it claims that documents sent to the cloud already have their visibility 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.

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This isn’t the first collaboration between Microsoft and Adobe. Its Adobe Acrobat Sign feature, allowing the printing of authentic “e-signatures” into documents, has already been made available as add-ins for Microsoft 365, Teams, and SharePoint. 

Moving forward, 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.