Acrobat.com - Adobe’s Online Office Suite

Another major change in Adobe’s steer towards their online presence is that of the just launched Acrobat.com. It is the combination of their online meetings tool – Adobe Brio, online Word Processor – Adobe Buzzword and online file sharing – Adobe Share. This new announcement comes with the release of their latest offering – Adobe Acrobat 9 – with Flash built into the PDF experience.

Adobe Buzzword

Buzzword is the word processor from Adobe and sports a sleek and elegant design interface. Of course, Adobe uses Flash/Flex to prove the UI and interaction complete with a WYSISYG tool. Adobe have taken care that your Buzzword document whether on a large screen or small screen or on a printed page, what you see on the screen - fonts, letter spacing, colors, and graphics - are all reproduced perfectly.

Buzzword documents can be edited by multiple person at a time and it can be commented. There are tabs at the bottom that shows who has accessed the documents recently and it also indicates their status whether they are authors, reviewers, co-author or readers. There are pagination features too.

The timeline whose dots indicates different version of the document is an awesome tool that will simply glide smoothly from one version to the next. It is always accessible at the bottom of the screen.

Adobe Brio

Acrobat.com has Brio, which is a light version of Adobe Acrobat Connect. It lets up to three people have online meetings for free, with screen sharing, desktop video, voice conferencing, chat, white-boarding. You can add in a regular toll line for a fee.

Adobe Brio, unlike WebEx and GoTo, works flawlessly and beautifully on a Mac.

Adobe Share

Adobe Share allows you to share files with others. Just many other typical file sharing platform, Adobe Share allows you to share large files instead of emailing them. You have full control over your documents – approve the recipient list and their access to a particular document. The document previewer built into Acrobat.com also lets you launch and view PDF and image files right in your browser instead of having to launch the original application.

Acrobat 9

The big news for Acrobat 9 is the support for Flash. You can now create documents with embedded Flash movies, or developers can design entire new skins for electronic documents using Adobe’s Flex. PDF documents made with Acrobat 9 also support collaboration among multiple authors and reviewers over the Internet, making them connected documents.

The PDF portfolios in Acrobat 9 allow you to combine multiple file types – documents, audio, video, even 3D objects – and compress them into one PDF file.

For professional paid version of Acrobat, there are varying levels of features available in the Standard and Professional allowing for the ability to create, convert, track, and protect PDFs. However, all versions are enabled to work with Acrobat.com. Even with all the new feature additions, Acrobat 9 takes lot less time to launch than Acrobat 8.