Worries about PDFs in Microsoft Teams will soon be a thing of the past after the collaboration tool launched a new integrated integration with Adobe Acrobat, allowing easy group access to documents directly within the app.
In a post (opens in a new tab) on the Microsoft Teams blog, the company announced that Acrobat can now be set as the default app for opening PDFs in Teams, providing features like collaborative sharing and review, comments, and annotations. , and access to PDF files stored in Microsoft Sharepoint and OneDrive.
The change will require an organization's IT administrator to set Acrobat as the default PDF app in the Teams admin center, and Microsoft will publish a guide (opens in a new tab) for configuring the feature. From there, all PDFs sent from individual chats and group channels will benefit from the change.
Adobe Acrobat on computers
All Teams users will benefit from the basic functionality of the Acrobat PDF reader, 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 also noted that PDF files that you collaborate with using Acrobat are temporarily sent to Adobe Document Cloud servers for encryption and then deleted from these servers after twenty-four hours.
Adobe, for its part, has published a whitepaper (opens in a new tab) that discusses the security procedures that govern its Document Cloud services. There, it states that documents sent to the cloud already have their visibility set to "private," which means that only users who have collaborated on a document can view it, and any external sharing actions must be performed by those users.
This is not the first collaboration between Microsoft and Adobe. Its Adobe Acrobat Sign functionality, which enables authentic "electronic signatures" to be printed on documents, is now available as an add-on for Microsoft 365, Teams, and SharePoint.
In the future, Adobe will offer "Live Sign" in Acrobat Sign In for Teams, which it hopes will provide a "real-time signing experience" without the need to meet in person.