Adobe have announced the release of Designer for forms and other server products.

The report at PDFzone includes a statement from Sydney Sloan, product marketing group manager for server products. The guidance is that these products are intended for organisations with above 500 users. "We're targetting Fortune 500 type companies."

It seems to me that JDF and the print industry do not really fit in with this picture. At drupa there was almost no promotion for PDF Jobready. There have been some reports of a concept around JDF tickets in InDesign and Acrobat. But there is almost no information about how this might work with server software.

The PDFzone article mentions a possible "$100,000 price tag ($200,000 for the Cadillac bundle)" for the "Intelligent Document Platform’s process-management components". Most print companies employ less than twenty people and have no IT department.

So the original idea of the portable job ticket is not going to work out as first imagined. There will be JDF data as well as PDF for copy. But there are many other ways of sending XML data.

Possibly over time there will be a different price level for PDF server software. There may be more information about implementations of PDF Jobready and JDF in InDesign / Acrobat. But other approaches seem more likely in the near future.