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Managing and Organizing

E-mail Using

Adobe

Acrobat

8

CONTENT

Sorting the (e) Mail

Devising an E-mail Folder System

Converting Folders of E-mail to PDF

Appending E-mail Documents to PDF

Files

Viewing Converted E-mail Documents

Searching E-mail PDFs

Organizing Files in Acrobat

Working with Organizer Content

Using PDF File Attachments

Securing File Attachments

Using a Secure Envelope in Acrobat

Automating the Archive Process

Managing and Organizing E-mail Using Adobe

Acrobat

8

Donna L. Baker

Adobe Press books are published by Peachpit.

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Peachpit is a division of Pearson Education

This publication is from the forthcoming book,

Adobe Acrobat 8 in the Office (0-321-47080-X) by Donna L. Baker.

Copyright © 2007 Donna L. Baker

Notice of Right

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written

permission of the publisher. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact

permissions@peachpit.com.

Notice of Liability

The information in this publication is distributed on an "As Is" basis without warranty. While every

precaution has been taken in the preparation of the publication, neither the author nor Peachpit shall

have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to

be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this publication or by the computer

software and hardware products described in it.

Trademarks

Adobe and Acrobat are trademarks or registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the prope rty of their respective owners. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this publication, and

Peachpit was aware of a

trademark claim, the designations appear as requested by the owner of the trademark. All other prod- uct names and services identified throughout this publication are used in editorial fashion only and for the benefit of such companies with no intention of infringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is intended to convey endorsement or other affiliation with this publication.

ISBN 0-321-48962-4

Published in the United States of America

One of our most common business tools is e-mail. Organizing and sorting e-mail is often cumbersome. Then there is the question of how to store e-mail: Do you save all the important e-mail messages in folders? What is the best way to organize and manage le attachments? What if you don"t necessarily need many of your e-mail les as ongoing working document sources but are required by law or policy to archive them? If these sound like questions you ask yourself often, this chapter is for you. Acrobat 8 installs a PDFMaker in Microsoft Outlook (Windows) that you can use to automatically convert either a single e-mail, a selection of e-mails, or folders of e-mails into PDF docu- ments. The content of a converted folder is displayed in Acrobat and includes navigation tools, and e-mail attachments can be maintained in their native format. In Acrobat, you can use the Organizer feature to keep track of your PDF documents. The Organizer lets you sort e-mail and other PDF documents in a number of ways. You can even create virtual folders within the Organizer to use for organizing and managing groups of les in collections. You can embed attachments in the e-mail and then transport them along with the PDF documents in a secure wrapper—sending the e-mail directly from within Acrobat—as you"ll see in this chapter"s project. You"ll also see how your e-mail"s recipients can save attachments from the PDF document, convert them to PDF, or extract them in their native le formats. Very handy features! Acrobat 8 offers a slick new feature for auto archiving. Rather than manually collecting, organizing, and converting e-mail into PDF, Acrobat can take care of it for you. Specify where the e-mail is located, what you need archived and when, and put that task out of your mind. Now if the program could only walk the dog!

Managing and

Organizing E-mail

Using Adobe

Acrobat

8

2MANAGING AND ORGANIZING E-MAIL USING ADOBE ACROBAT 8

Sorting the (e) Mail

This is the story of Angie Johnson, a modern-day businesswoman with a modern-day problem. Angie is a successful distributor for Johnson Outdoors, a garden and landscape contracting rm. Angie is making a name for her company with her use of unusual, new, and environmentally sensitive materials and methods. Angie prefers to conduct much of her business online via manufacturers" Web site por- tals and e-mail—clarifying orders, discussing invoices, conrming shipping details, and so on. She often nds it difcult to keep track of the e-mail threads and attachments she includes with her correspondence, and she nds she spends a great deal of time sifting through e-mails for particular information. Another problem Angie has is maintaining her catalogs of information she sends to cus- tomers. Angie maintains up-to-date material and specication sheets for all the products she deals with and makes it a policy to send copies to her customers to help them make decisions on products and materials for their projects. In addition, she needs to make sure documents are seen by the right people. She some- times has to send reminder letters and overdue statements, and she worries that some- one other than the intended recipients might see the contents. Angie decides to devise a system that allows her to organize her e-mail content, keep track of her attachments, and send les to her customers that can be secured in a cus- tomized Envelope (Figure 6.1). And she can do all this using Acrobat 8.

Acrobat automatically

inserts the date.

Add custom artwork

to the template.

Use the default template

or create your own!

Type information in fields

provided on the template.

Insert messages as a watermark

that you can change.

You can secure

documents by putting them all in Acrobat's

Envelope.

Figure 6.1 You can create and use a Secured Envelope to securely send your e-mails. 3

Steps Involved in This Project

There is no tangible output from this project since it is designed as a demonstration of how you can handle e-mail and attachment control issues using Acrobat 8. To deal with her e-mails, Angie needs to do the following: Evaluate the structure of her e-mail folders. It"s simpler to convert entire folders of e-mail files than single files. Convert her e-mails to PDF in Outlook. She can convert either one or more selected e-mail files or a folder of e-mails at one time; she can also append new e-mails to an existing PDF document. Create collections in Acrobat"s Organizer to hold documents for clients and manufacturers. Apply a template in Acrobat for an Envelope (a secure wrapper for a document"s content). Set options in Outlook to automatically archive e-mail on a specified schedule. Angie decides to start by organizing the folders she has already constructed in her e-mail program, Microsoft Outlook. Acrobat 8 includes a PDFMaker for Lotus Notes, which is installed as a group of com- mands on the Actions menu, that provides many of the same features as those used in this project. The one notable exception is that you can"t auto-archive messages from Lotus Notes. If you don"t use Outlook as your e-mail client, you won"t have a PDFMaker to work with to convert files or folders to PDF or append e-mails to existing PDF files. Instead, you can save the e-mails from your program as text files and then convert them to PDF from Acrobat. See the project details in Chapter 2, "Building a Cohesive Document," (from the book, Adobe Acrobat 8 in the Ofce) to learn about creating PDF files in Acrobat. NOTE The e-mail files used in this project are generic—choose any number of e-mails from your own system and apply the processes described in this project.

Devising an E-mail Folder System

Angie decides to use the structure she has been working with in Outlook. In Figure 6.2, you can see she has a main folder for the client and year named "Harvey 2006," and sev- eral folders within the job folder for different aspects of the job.

DEVISING AN E-MAIL FOLDER SYSTEM

4MANAGING AND ORGANIZING E-MAIL USING ADOBE ACROBAT 8

Subfolders for material categories

Client folder

Figure 6.

2

Angie organizes her e-mail into

categories according to individual client projects. She plans to convert the folders of e-mail to PDF files. As you'll see later in the chapter, she doesn't have to worry about attachments to the e-mails - they can be included as part of the PDF files automatically.

Converting Folders of E-mail to PDF

The simplest way to convert e-mails to PDF in Outlook is to use the Outlook PDFMaker, a menu and toolbar used for converting files to PDF that is installed in Outlook auto- matically as part of the Acrobat 8 installation process. When you specify conversion settings, the settings are used by default until you change them. For example, if Angie uses the View Adobe PDF Result option, the document opens in Acrobat each time she creates a new PDF file from an e-mail or a folder of e-mails. Before converting files, she takes a minute to check the conversion settings. NOTE If you are working with a different e-mail program than Outlook or Lotus Notes, convert the les to PDF from Acrobat; you can still use the conversion settings described in this section. 5

Adjusting Conversion Settings

Angie takes some time at the outset to build her PDF e-mail system. Before converting any files, she opens and modifies the conversion settings.

Follow these steps to adjust the settings:

1. In Outlook, choose Adobe PDF > Change Conversion Settings to open the Acrobat

PDFMaker dialog (Figure 6.3).

Figure 6.

3

Choose settings for

conversion before creating PDF files from e-mails.

2. On the Settings tab, choose options for conversion based on how you need to use

the e-mails (see the next section for setting these options).

3. Select the Security tab and add the desired security settings.

4. Define archival methods and frequencies on the Automatic Archival tab (see how

Angie sets up an archive in the section "Automating the Archive Process" at the end of this chapter).

5. Click OK to close the dialog.

CONVERTING FOLDERS OF E-MAIL TO PDF

6MANAGING AND ORGANIZING E-MAIL USING ADOBE ACROBAT 8

FILING AND SORTING

There are as many ways to organize e-mail as there are e-mail users. Unless you are bound by government or business regulations, find the method that works best for your e-mail habits. Whichever organization scheme you choose, it is important to plan ahead. When you want to convert e-mails and attachments in Outlook to PDF versions, keep these few ideas in mind: Organize the e-mails you want to convert into folders. You can choose a folder and convert its entire contents to PDF with one mouse click. Name the folders using a meaningful name - when you convert the folder to PDF, the folder name is used as the PDF filename. You can create a series of collections in the Organizer that parallels your e-mail folder structure. Using the Organizer means you can access the folders' contents directly from within Acrobat to prepare content for mailing, to do a search for specific terms, and so on. If you are working with an e-mail client other than Outlook, create the folders for the collections on your hard drive.

Choosing conversion options

The default settings for converting e-mail in Outlook"s PDFMaker are shown in Figure

6.3. By default, the PDFMaker uses the Acrobat 8 Compatibility option, which allows

creation of a PDF Package—a collection of separate PDF files within one named PDF file. You can choose to include attachments or not using options from the Attachments pull- down menu. Because Angie wants her attachments included in the converted e-mails, she leaves the default option. The next three check boxes pertain to how and when the converted document is dis- played. Since Angie is converting batches of folders, she clears the View Adobe PDF Results option to save time. Otherwise, each time she converts a folder, it will open in Acrobat. She intends to use a navigation structure in Acrobat for working with the e-mail files, so she leaves the “Output Adobe PDF Package when creating a new PDF file" option selected. She clears the “Embed index for faster searching" option since she doesn"t need the index attached. The index adds to the file size, and since she"s not working with many long documents, she can quickly search the e-mails without using indexes. 7 Angie decides to leave the Page Layout options at their default settings. Using these options, her converted e-mails are shown on letter-sized pages with standard margins and a portrait orientation. With this basic page layout, Angie can easily print PDF ver- sions of the e-mails. Now it"s time to convert the files. Drum roll, please!

Processing the Files

Converting folders of e-mails in Outlook to PDF is a simple one-click process. Angie has organized her content into folders, and now she decides to convert her client"s folder into a packaged PDF document.

Follow these steps to create the PDF:

1. Select the folder for conversion in the All Mail Items listing in Outlook (the folders

are shown in Figure 6.2).

2. On the PDFMaker toolbar, click the Convert

Folders icon to open the Convert folder(s) to

PDF dialog (Figure 6.4).

3. Click to select the folder or folders for conver-

sion. To save time, Angie selects the "Convert this folder and all subfolders" check box at the lower left of the dialog. She wants all the client"s e-mail converted in one action.

4. Click OK to close the dialog and open the Save

Adobe PDF File As dialog.

5. The name of the selected folder is shown as the

PDF filename. Leave the default name or type

an alternate name, and then select a folder loca- tion. Angie is converting the Harvey 2006 project folder contents, so she"ll use the default names throughout.

6. Click Save.

CONVERTING FOLDERS OF E-MAIL TO PDF

Figure 6.

4

Choose the folder for

conversion from the dialog.

8MANAGING AND ORGANIZING E-MAIL USING ADOBE ACROBAT 8

7. The Creating Adobe PDF dialog opens

(Figure 6.5). A progress bar shows the files as they are being processed. The dialog includes the name of the mail folder. As each file is processed, the mail subject is shown in the dialog as well.

When the PDF document is assembled,

the dialog closes automatically.

8. Repeat the folder and file selection and

conversion process as necessary.

It's simple to add additional content to an

existing PDF version of your e-mail files in

Outlook using another PDFMaker tool, as

Angie discovers next.

Appending E-mail Documents to PDF Files

Managing a folder of active e-mails on a specific thread or topic is an ongoing process, and the ability to add new content to an e-mail is an important element for successfully managing your e-mails. Rather than manually converting individual e-mails to a new PDF, opening the existing e-mail PDF in Acrobat, and then appending the new e-mail PDF to the file, Angie can use a PDFMaker tool in Outlook to automatically add new content to e-mails. NOTE If you aren"t working with Outlook, you will have to follow the manual conversionquotesdbs_dbs4.pdfusesText_8

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