Document Collaboration

June 2, 2008

Work. Together. Anywhere. Erik Larson and his team at Adobe have good reason to be excited about their new path and recent (06-02-08) beta launch of Acrobat.com. Their goal for the next few years is BIG but simple: they want to change the way the world works together on documents, for the better.

Acrobat.com is a set of online services — file sharing and storage, PDF converter, online word processor, and web conferencing. Use to create and share documents, communicate in real time, and simplify working with others without email attachments or version confusion.

Give it a try, get more efficient, and be sure to let them know what you think. You can sign up for FREE at Acrobat.com.

THE ADOBE TEAM IS STARTING OUT WITH (3) DISTINCTIVE APPLICATIONS:

• Adobe Buzzword for creating and reviewing documents together

• Adobe ConnectNow for holding full-fledged online web conferences with up to three people

• Acrobat.com organizer for sharing 5GB of online files with everyone in the world or a select few

Even more, Acrobat.com gives you the ability to convert documents to PDF and embed your documents in blogs, wikis or other web pages.

USER NEED: Adobe believes that while most people are pretty well served by their software when it comes to their individual office productivity, there are still enormous productivity increases to be gained by helping people to work with others more effectively.

Delivering software as a service online is an ideal way to improve collaboration. With services delivered online, people and their content are no longer isolated from each other, and can be connected with their colleagues and their audiences in real time. When your high-value content resides online, you no longer need to push out copies of it to other people. Instead, you just invite your intended audience to share the single copy of your content, so there is no confusion about where to find it, and no version collision.

SERVICES: Adobe’s aim is to provide FREE document collaboration services for individuals that will meet the needs of most people. These services will remain FREE even when they come out of their beta phase. Over time they will provide businesses with premium subscription services such as workgroup capabilities, administrative controls, more advanced document workflows and additional capacity. But in the meantime, they’re confident that they’re FREE services will provide great value to millions of users - they know this because they’ve heard such positive reviews during their early “preview” phase.

When asked about whether they have any plans to put advertising in Acrobat.com. In short, that is not their plan today. Adobe has built a great business selling software, and they plan to continue to do so with software as a service via Acrobat.com. Fundamentally their customers are the people and companies who work to create documents, not advertisers looking for valuable inventory. So look for Adobe to provide more and more services related to documents, but don’t expect advertisements to show up inside or along side your work anytime soon.

HISTORY: Fifteen years ago Adobe invented PDF to move the world from paper documents to portable electronic documents that anyone can see on any computer. Now, with Acrobat.com, they want to extend that idea to the act of actually creating documents together, so that you can work with anyone, anywhere.

Just as the rise of email and the web spurred the adoption of portable electronic documents, they believe that the rise of rich internet applications and cloud computing will drive the adoption of online document collaboration.

Today’s desktop office suites give us just about everything we need to get our individual work done, but fall far short when it comes to working with other people, explains Adobe’s Erik Larson.

The raft of online office applications like Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live, Docstoc, Scribd, just to name a few, that have emerged in the past few years are taking initial steps in this direction and in many respects Acrobat.com is continuing on this newly established path. But they believe those applications force people to make too many sacrifices in the quality of the work produced and don’t go far enough to invent a new experience for working together.

MISSION: Acrobat.com is focused on document collaboration as their core mission; they are not just recreating desktop software online. A look at Adobe Buzzword shows what this means in practice. People are core to every document you are working on; you can see if they are present in the document, what version they have seen, what their relationship is to the document. Commenting on the document is not a mode you move into or an afterthought…they expect that you will always be in need of leaving comments for others, and so the little comment bubble is always there. And the history of the document is stored automatically, showing you who made changes over time and letting you easily move back and forth between versions.

EXPERIENCE: With Acrobat.com people will not have to sacrifice the quality of their documents or the quality of the user experience in order to work together more efficiently online. The documents look great. They are truly ‘what you see is what you get’ no matter who you are or what computer you are using, including the text, the graphics, and the pages. Finally, the user experience or design of the applications is beautiful, easy to use and getting better all the time.

TECHNOLOGY: Acrobat.com takes the meaning of rich internet application to the next level by using the Adobe technology platform of Flash, Flex, PDF and AIR to create distinctive and compelling software. You can access Acrobat.com while online from almost any browser thanks to the Flash Player or from your desktop via Acrobat.com on AIR. And soon you will be able to access your work via the AIR version of Acrobat.com even while off-line.

Give it a try, get more efficient, and be sure to let them know what you think. You can sign up for FREE at Acrobat.com. Thanks for the information update Erik and hat’s off to you and the entire Adobe team.

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