Microsoft Office 2007 will start shipping this week but even you buy a copy of Adobe Acrobat 8 today, the software won't work with any of the Office 2007 programs including Word, Excel or Outlook.Infact, Adobe customers will have to wait until the first half of 2007 when Adobe issues a free Acrobat 8 patch [like Acrobat 8.1] to make the PDF software compatible with Office 2007 programs. [hat tip: Navjot]
And there's some bad news for Acrobat 7 users who were planning to upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007 - Adobe Acrobat 7.0 and earlier version will not support Office 2007 programs or Office 2007 file formats. You will have to upgrade to Acrobat 8.1 in order to print Office 2007 documents using Acrobat PDF Maker.
The Microsoft Office Save as PDF plugin doesn't support Outlook 2007 so you would need a third-party PDF converter for saving Outlook emails as PDF files. [An upgrade license of Acrobat Professional 8.0 costs in excess of $100]
Looking back, Adobe literally left no stone unturned to prevent Microsoft from developing native PDF printing support in Office 2007 and more or less succeeded in their mission.
But now, by not supporting Office 2007 in Acrobat 7 and delaying the Acrobat 8.1 release, Adobe just made the going simple for Microsoft. More and more Office 2007 users will be willing to try out the Microsoft Save as PDF plugin and some of them may never switch back to Acrobat.