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Adobe Acrobat X and SharePoint – close, but no cigar

17 May, 2011 (17:18) | SharePoint, Tools | By: Paul Liebrand

Adobe X was released at the end of last year and one of the feature points announced was “Native, seamless integration with Microsoft SharePoint”.  On the surface, everything appears to work correctly and solved one of the main issues with Adobe Acrobat with SharePoint I blogged about in the past.

Recently discovered that it is not as seamless as we would like. Adobe X does not appear to work with the following column types:

  • Date and Time
  • Person or Group
  • Lookup

If you have a date and time column on a document library and you attempt to save the PDF back to SharePoint, you will receive the following error message:

File check in failed. The server said:

“Invalid date/time value

A date/time field contains invalid data. Please check the value and try again.”

AdobeXError

Using Fiddler, I can see the SOAP request that the date field is being sent over as straight text. When using the lists web service, it requires the date to be in ISO 8601.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SOAP-ENV:Envelope xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <SOAP-ENV:Body>
    <UpdateListItems xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/">
        <listName>{5398FF80-036F-40DB-92D5-264D72DE43B3}</listName>
        <updates>
            <Batch OnError="Continue">
                <Method Cmd="Update" ID="1"><Field Name="Title"/>
                    <Field Name="Date">05/17/2011 05:00:00</Field>
                    <Field Name="FileRef">http://portal.company.com/z/EditTest.pdf</Field>
                    <Field Name="ID">1</Field>
                    <Field Name="ContentTypeId">0x010100EAB6ED7FBD4A0042A6F9326944DCEE19</Field>
                    <Field Name="ContentType">Document</Field>
                </Method>
            </Batch>
        </updates>
    </UpdateListItems>
    </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

The Person or Group field just shows the value as it stored within SharePoint:

-1#;Name

The Lookup field just does not show anything.

I hope Adobe is listening and releases an update that resolves these issues.

[Update]

We received word from Adobe that the “date” issue will be resolved in a release slated for September.  The other issues will be hopefully resolved in the version after that (next year).


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  • jritmeijer

     I know it is a shameless plug, but if you want to do any kind of PDF Automation in SharePoint then you are best off using a third party product. Letting end users carry out a manual PDF Conversion is going to be difficult to enforce in a business process. See http://www.muhimbi.com/Products/PDF-Converter-for-SharePoint/summary.aspx

  • http://www.paulliebrand.com Paul Liebrand

    No such thing as shameless plugs =P

    I hear what you are saying but we have a whole department of attorneys that
    live and breathe Adobe Acrobat — they use the product every single day. We
    have tried looking at alternatives that work better with SharePoint but they
    do not work as good as Acrobat when it comes to pure PDF stuff.

    Thanks,

    Paul

  • http://twitter.com/acro_dave Dave Stromfeld

    Hi, Paul.
    With their integration with SharePoint, Acrobat and Reader X support many SharePoint metadata types. Unfortunately, the ones you list above aren’t supported yet. We are looking to add support for these SharePoint metadata types in a future release.
    Thanks for your post.
    Dave Stromfeld, Acrobat & Reader Team at Adobe
    http://twitter.com/#!/acro_dave
    http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobat/

  • http://www.paulliebrand.com Paul Liebrand

    Glad to see you guys listening! Thanks for letting us know.

  • Tim Andrews

    Hi, Paul!

    This is the only site I could find mentioning the error at all.

    I’m having the exact same issue now since people started using pdf files..

    Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the only solution for now is NOT to use date and time column on a document library?

    Thanks!

    Tim Andrews

  • http://photography.paulliebrand.com Paul Liebrand

    You can use the date and time columns — just do not make them required.

  • Tim Andrews

    And the solution is so simple. Thank you very much! :)

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_KYX6T7IIMIU7FFWQT3EXS5OQ6U mrhapiguy

    Anyone know if the update that fixes this issue is available yet?  I could really use this…

  • trickyw00

    Note that in SharePoint 2010 managed metadata columns are also not supported and cause errors on save…this renders and claims of SharePoint integration null and void as far as I’m concerned…huge problem. I’d also question whether anyone is listening, despite requests there is still no where I can find detailing what is and isn’t supported.

  • http://photography.paulliebrand.com Paul Liebrand

    I 100% completely agree with you. This lack of good SharePoint / Adobe integration has gone on for too long.