Adobe Document Cloud

Delivering New Adobe-Based Tools and Solutions to Help Industries Come Back from COVID Stronger

Apps & Websites Talent as a Service

The Challenge

In May of 2020 Adobe saw an opportunity to help aid business recovery from the Coronavirus pandemic. Small businesses, Non-profits, government agencies, and the Educational community had been hit especially hard. Adobe wanted a fast and effective way to get new, innovative solutions leveraging their Adobe Document Cloud suite to the market. So, they called on Topcoder.

Adobe Document Cloud is used by organizations of all sizes, and includes popular PDF tools like Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat Reader, and Adobe Scan. Digital services have become so vital to discovering new and more efficient ways of getting things done. The Adobe Document Cloud COVID Challenge Series brought new business applications and concepts to market using the Adobe Document Cloud SDKs and APIs.

The Solution

Phase 1 – Education & Ramp
We ramped the talent in our community to Adobe Document services, a robust catalog of APIs for embedded viewing and manipulation of PDFs via an accelerated series of educational challenges, providing our members with the necessary knowledge on how to wield the APIs, SDKs and more.

Phase 2 – Execution with the Adobe Stack
We focused on the creation of MVPs with two unique use cases in mind.

Use case 1 – Consumption of public information measurement and analysis

The goal was to explore ways that public and private agencies can use PDF libraries to publish information and gain insight into public interest during the pandemic. The outcome was developers created a simple web application with PDFs rendered in a customizable, embedded web viewer, and an analytics dashboard to track how users consume and interact with the information.

Winning submissions included:

  1. A US Department of Health and Human Services site to share information about the spread, symptoms, and statistics related to COVID-19
  2. A government healthcare website relating to mental health
  3. An improved IRS site to help the public access forms and resources

Use case 2 – Collaborative learning

The goal was to help teachers and students seamlessly collaborate in schools through the capabilities of the PDF SDKs. The outcome was developers created a simple web application where teachers and students used annotations and comments to work through the material together. These marked-up materials could then be transformed into reference documents and test guides to help students learn.

Winning submissions implemented key features including authentication, sticky notes, and whiteboards. The result was a modern, collaborative digital learning environment made possible by the PDF SDKs.

Impact

Topcoder delivered several extremely useful concepts that utilized Adobe’s technologies in novel ways. The combination of Adobe’s powerful APIs, plus on-demand technologists with a desire to code for good, created a winning formula. Adobe has always stood for a diversity of talent and collaborative innovation, and by tapping Topcoder’s open community of developers and technologists, Adobe pushed innovation in terms of how work gets done in the future.

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“What stood out for me was the creativity and the unique perspectives the participants had as they looked at the challenge…. Time and again, we have seen when you bring a global diverse talent pool together, the outcomes are always better.”

Vibhor Kapoor , Senior Director of Marketing, Adobe