The really good news is that there will probably be another Seybold event in Amsterdam. Hans Hartman said that the expectation for a first event was between 200 and 300, so they are pleased with the actual attendance of 450. There is space for maybe four times as many though in the main forum so potential for more people in Europe to hear about this.

http://www.seybold365.com/amsterdam2003/

James King keynote covered ten years of Acrobat and PDF. The original design aims included fitting Acrobat onto one floppy and running on 640k DOS. Now it becomes clear that Amber (version 3) was the first one that did 'the publishing things'. 'Before that, we targeted the office.'

There may be more versions of Acrobat tools, such as the Professional and Standard with Acrobat 6. Apparently the thinking is that "more people could use standard if it wasn't priced so high". Strangely, 6 Standard seems to be more expensive than Acrobat 5 and to not include the forms creation features. Maybe other options will follow later.

The discussion on PDF seems to work well with a basis in European print. The proofing discussion was fairly technical, based around activities of the European Color Initiative.
http://www.eci.org/eng/index_e.html

A rare reference to the internet came through a presentation on WebProof, using Acrobat6 and WebDAV for proofing. Comments can be added outside of Acrobat for those who don't have it.
http://www.webproof.com

The first day included coverage of Enterprise Content Management, something that usually takes several days. It was comprehensive within the time but my surprise was at how little mention there was of the Adobe server software and how PDF could fit with other systems. This did come up, but there was no Adobe presence on this occasion.
http://www.gilbane.com/amsterdam03.html

Tomorrow David Brailsford will be talking about PDF and XML within a stream on the 'data-connected enterprise' . Maybe some of the links to content management will come up there.

There will also be the release of a Seybold survey on PDF usage in Europe. It will be interesting to compare this with the first one based mostly on responses from the USA.

No mention of 'Network Publishing'. Creo spoke about 'Networked Graphic Production' within their seven minutes. So the scope is a bit limited in concentrating on print workflow. Still, this is a solid basis. Maybe web design will creep in as a topic next time.

More follows, maybe Saturday.