Adobe launches Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com online office suite

Filed under: Utilities, Web services, Adobe, web 2.0

Adobe launches Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com online office suite

by Brad Linder Jun 2nd 2008

Adobe has built a suite of online office applications to compliment Buzzword, the company's online word processor. We've covered Buzzword in the past. It's pretty, fast, and not really all that much more useful than similar products from Google or Zoho. Here's a rundown of the other applications you'll find at Acrobat.com:

ConnectNow: A web conferenceing tool that lets you share your desktop with others, chat, talk over a VoIP connection, or share files and mark up whiteboards.
Share: Selectively share files with other users. Adobe Share lets you send files to a list of contacts, and lets the recipients view PDF image, and video files online.
Create PDF: Seriously, do we need to tell you what this does?
My Files: Store and organize up to 5GB of files online.

You'll notice that Acrobat.com doesn't have a complete office suite. There are no spreadsheet or presentation applications. But that 5GB of free storage space is pretty attractive.

Adobe has also released Acrobat 9, an updated version of its desktop PDF reader. The biggest change in Acrobat 9 is support for embedded Flash, which means you might start finding PDF documents with embedded YouTube videos or other Flash content.

Tags: acrobat, acrobat-9, acrobat.com, adobe, flash

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Gihan said 10:44AM on 6-02-2008

I just acrobated all over by screen!

LeeH said 11:21AM on 6-02-2008

Small correction: Adobe Reader is the desktop PDF reader. Acrobat is the program for manipulating PDF files (editing, merging, sharing, applying passwords etc.)

Monkey said 11:43AM on 6-02-2008

And, although Acrobat may have been updated to version 9, Acrobat Reader is still being offered as version 8 right now.

Marco said 12:46PM on 6-02-2008

Too bad that their sign up form doesn't really work. Form says my mail address X@XXX.TLD is invalid. Already sent a support request to Adobe... but I never received an answer from Adobe in the past (other questions), so I doubt that I'll ever be able to use this service.

Anyway, just saw that they have a five free-PDF-conversations restriction. Makes this service look very bad, I think. Even if they would only allow ... let`s say ten conversations a day they would sure kick all the free online .doc to .pdf Ghostscript converters out of business lol

But some dreams never come true :-p

Benjamin Wright said 1:35PM on 6-02-2008

Brad: Collaborative software environments like Acrobat.com and Zoho can create oceans of records on business interactions, negotiations and contracts. Those records can be relevant in a lawsuit. An issue businesses will face is whether to preserve those records under their record retention policies. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/02/collaboration-e-discovery-and-record.html

Marco said 3:36PM on 6-02-2008

Ben, exactly! That's the thing why I was never able to understand why COMPANIES use hosted products.

If I would own a company I would develop collaboration software OR host collaboratiion software on MY servers and not somewhere else where I cannot control what's happenin with my files. Serious, I wonder how often the "Application hosting companies" copy our files... lol

But we'll see in 10 years when Google (for example) knows people from A-Z.. and people wonder where Google got the info from... ;-)

Brian Yuhnke said 2:50PM on 6-02-2008

Users are Limted to 3 people per Web Conference room. Honestly, how does one have a "full-fledged online web conference" with three people?!?!

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