Forms, digital signatures, cross platform issues

I am trying to implement pdf forms in an educational environment to utilize digital signatures and reduce paper. The form data does not need to go anywhere. It just stays in the form at this point. Some people on campus have Windows machines, others have Macs. All the Windows machines have Acrobat Pro installed and not Reader. The Mac people are more likely to have Reader. There have been problems with emailing these forms between platforms. Does anyone have any ideas about how to solve this? My IT department will not support Reader on Windows machines, so the forms have to work in Acrobat and Reader! How should the orginal document I put online be saved to work in both programs and platforms? What direction should I give the users about how to save the forms they fill out and sign? I've looked all over for this kind of info, but can't seem to find it. Any and all help is greatly appreciated. FYI, I am not an IT person. Thanks!!!

For Mac users, it will be important that they don't use the Preview application to work with the forms. Preview is the default Mac PDF viewer out of the box, and it corrupts PDF forms when it saves them, so it really needs to be avoided.
In order for Reader to save a filled-in form and apply digital signatures, the forms need to be Reader-enabled, which can be done with Acrobat Pro. Acrobat Standard can Reader-enable documents too, but it doesn't apply the digital signature usage right.
The problem with this is if you will be getting the forms returned to you, you can only use data from no more than 500 instances for the form, including hardcopies. This is an Acrobat License Agreement restriction. If they won't be returned, there won't be a problem. Also, the Acrobat users don't need to use a Reader-enabled version, so you can collect all the forms you want from them.
Email will be most reliable if the user manually attaches the file to an email, as opposed to setting up a button on the forms to submit to an email address. You'll find many threads here discussing the emailing difficulties with forms that are set up this way. The problems can be minimized with user education, as the manual process is available in either case. A submit button provides convenience, unless it doesn't work, and it won't for some users.

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Forms, digital signatures, cross platform issues

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