Throughout the past year, Adobe has been steadily enhancing its suite of resources designed to assist developers in integrating PDFs into their applications. Earlier this year, in April, the company introduced a pair of Software Development Kits (SDKs), now recognized as the PDF Embed API and PDF Tools API, alongside the launch of its Adobe Document Services platform. The core concept behind this initiative is to equip developers with straightforward tools for incorporating PDFs into their applications and operational processes. Today, the company is announcing a new collaboration with Microsoft, extending Document Services functionality to Power Automate, Microsoft’s platform for low-code workflow automation.

“Approximately a year and a half ago, we envisioned extending the superior capabilities we offer within our own applications to applications developed by others,” explained Vibhor Kapoor, Adobe’s Senior Director of Marketing for Document Services. “This simple idea led us to deconstruct the functionalities of Acrobat into microservices and APIs, making them accessible to developers and publishers. Historically, working with PDFs has presented difficulties for developers and publishers, and we aimed to resolve that. Thus, these services were brought to fruition.”

The development team focused on improving the process of embedding PDFs within web-based environments, and Kapoor openly admitted that the previous developer experience was consistently “suboptimal,” with the user experience often lacking intuitiveness. Now, utilizing Document Services and the Embed API, embedding a PDF requires only a few lines of JavaScript code.

Kapoor conceded that making these features available through SDKs and APIs presented certain hurdles, as the teams were not initially focused on this particular application. Beyond the technical challenges, this also necessitated a shift in perspective. “We haven’t traditionally offered a product specifically geared towards developers, which means we needed to assemble a team that understands their needs and determine the best way to package and deliver these APIs,” he stated.

The integration with Power Automate introduces over 20 new actions centered around PDFs, drawing from the capabilities of the PDF Tools API within Microsoft’s platform. Users will be able to perform tasks such as generating PDFs from files stored in a OneDrive folder, transforming images into PDF format, or utilizing optical character recognition (OCR) on PDFs.

Since the launch of these platforms, approximately 6,000 developers have begun utilizing them, and Kapoor reports observing “substantial growth” in the volume of API requests being processed. From a business standpoint, the addition of Power Automate is also expected to serve as a new avenue for attracting additional developers to the platform.