Continuing its push to become a major provider of Webtop software, Adobe is releasing two new products on Monday: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9. Adobe’s Webtop arsenal already includes the recently launched online version of PhotoShop and its online media player, Adobe TV. Acrobat.com is another big step towards bringing more desktop-like experiences to the Web. “It is our intent to blur a lot of the lines of the past,” says product manager Erik Larson.
Acrobat.com—Online Word Processing, Meetings, and File Sharing
Acrobat.com is a combination of three recently launched online services: Adobe Brio (online meetings), Adobe Buzzword (online word processor), and Adobe Share (online file sharing). Thus with the public beta launch of Acrobat.com, Adobe is taking on Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting—all at the same time.
Buzzword is now integrated into Acrobat.com as the default word processor. (I reviewed Buzzword and Share when they first launched last March). Multiple people can edit a document and leave comments. Tabs along the bottom representing different people show you who has accessed the document most recently and their status (author, reviewer, etc.). It paginates documents, supports all kinds of fonts, and lets you create the closest equivalent to a PDF that is possible online.
All the documents on Acrobat.com are organized in what up until now has been Adobe Share. The document and file-sharing service now offers five gigabytes of free storage, and lets you embed documents in a widget on other sites across the Web. (I’ve put an Adobe PDF widget at the bottom of this post). This last feature should worry startups like Scribd and DocStoc, which are based entirely on the ability to upload and share documents in a similar fashion.
Finally, my favorite part, Acrobat.com includes 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. Anyone with a Mac is going to love this. Whenever I get a virtual demo, I prefer to do it through Adobe Connect because WebEx and GoTo Meeting sometimes don’t work with my Mac. And Adobe’s Flash viewer simply looks better.
Acrobat 9—Now With Flash
At the same time Adobe is launching Acrobat.com, it is releasing Acrobat 9—a major upgrade to one of its anchor desktop apps. The big news here is that for the first time, Adobe’s PDF-creating desktop software will support Flash. So people can now create documents with embedded Flash movies from YouTube, or developers can design entire new skins for electronic documents using Adobe’s Flex framework—the same programming tool they use to create Web applications.
PDF documents made with Acrobat 9 also support collaboration among multiple authors and reviewers over the Internet, making them connected documents. Best of all, they no longer take forever to load. The next step is for Adobe to make it easy to turn any PDF into a Web page, and vice versa.
Acrobat 9 looks great, it is awesome that they incorporated it with flash! Can’t wait to try it.
http://mikesmoneyclub.blogspot.com
Interesting… everybody wants a piece of the webtop nowadays… nice!!
Can you read PDFs embedded with Flash movies in previous versions of Adobe Reader ?
This is pretty cool. Actually, very cool
Brio’s new “Grown-Up” name is ConnectNow - Brio was our beta code-name. Still, a rose by any other name… glad you like it
Disclaimer: I work for Adobe (but not in the Acrobat team)
I have to agree with Mike. The free Connect Now as part of Acrobat.com is a game changer and has the potential to bring real time web based collaboration to the masses. Also embedded real-time application sharing in Acrobat and Reader is very impressive. More about it on my Blog http://blog.matthiaszeller.com
agree Nigle , very cool ,ah …try it~~~
Adobe Share strikes me as an extremely poor way to share documents online. It locks down the content of the embedded document so that the user cannot do anything with it except read or download it.
Scribd’s iPaper at least allows hyperlinks in the text of embeds and the ability to copy and paste text, which is vital if you want people to reuse, blog about or otherwise promote your content.
I don’t understand why the owners of Flash Paper had to use such a restrictive document sharing technology.
Problem is Adobe has the enterprise web publishing market sewn up, so pretty soon the web will be awash in these useless Adobe Share documents.
Acrobat.com sure looks good. But seriously, Flash-only webpages? How about some HTML? That’s why I would still rather use Google Docs.
I’ve been playing with Zoho and GoogleDocs for a while now, and the interface on Adobe feels a lot nicer, and seems to have more much more page formatting options. AND, the thing that immediately stood out to me was the new, classy-looking fonts. Very nice idea going with those, Adobe!
It’s good that Adobe wasn’t there to shape the Web and HTML or we would be stuck with PDFs and knew no better.
The new PDF format will be just another attack vector.
If you use the new methodology (that is — embedding Flash directly in the PDF document with Acrobat 9) you will need Adobe Reader 9 to fully experience the information — and only Adobe Reader 9 (Adobe Flash Player is not accessed). For those with earlier versions of Adobe Reader:
1) If the PDF document was prepared using Acrobat 9’s new functionality — the default is that they would only see the “poster” view — that is a single frame of the content.
2) The author could use the “legacy” tools available in Acrobat 8 and Acrobat 9 to embed the Flash content. This solution however, would require the end-user have Flash Player installed.
A new Threat to SlideShare, Scribd, Google Docs, Zoho, Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting.
Simply awesome..
What’s with the Adobe boosting here? This is a second-rate product suite. The Adobe Share feature is an abomination. Dead content, essentially an image in Flash. None of the functionality of the source document is retained, such as links.
And Acrobat.com is set up with one purpose, to sell you PDF Maker and other products. It’s not really free if you’re a power user.
No one need feel threatened by this, but we should question why so many on this thread seems so gaga over it.
Yes, the site itself has a nice interface, but what about the product? It sucks, doesn’t it?
Personally, I’m not very fond of Adobe,
but Acrobat.com looks quite promising.
Buzzword feels very smooth and solid to work with. I hope they work on adding other languages soon as without a spellchecker in other languages, you’ll only find serious use in english speaking countries now.
Who cares if it uses Flash?
ConnectNow (good to see Breeze so grown up!) is also looking very slick and happy to see it free!
I have a feeling that about 90% of the comments so far are from Adobe employees.
All I have to say is WHAT EVER. Like anyone really expects acrobat.com to go anywhere? Come on. Acrobat Reader (desktop version) has become such a bloated piece of shit, I cry every time it loads on my computer. Everyone who knew what they were doing at Adobe apparently quit because other than “AIR” nothing good has come out of this company for many years now. And I dont even like AIR that much, but I use a program built upon it (twhirl) and it seems pretty good so I give it a sideways thumb.
Sean@: “nothing good has come out of this company for many years now”
They have Flash, Flex, PDF, Photoshop, AIR, ………………. There is a long list of really dominating products from Adobe.
Bloatware doesn’t = web 2.0. The mere though of having to update Acrobat yet again makes me cringe.
Oops, don’t look now but the Acrobat Share embed in your post isn’t loading…
Acrobat Share is down across the web. Just tried to log in and there’s this error:
Bad Gateway
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) Server at share.acrobat.com Port 80
Confirmed that other sites with Acrobat Share embeds are also not showing them.
Yikes, Adobe isn’t exactly a start-up so there’s not excuse for this on launch day.
Did any of you guys notice that Acrobat.com actually runs on Alfresco?
I got an error message when trying to delete a file (there is quite a delay in file processing I must say), and it was an alfresco error message…
Nathan@: Same I experienced. You are right. it may be because service is in Beta, but
I’m with Sean. Can’t wait for yet another Acrobat automatic updater popup. And seriously, flash? I realize that it’s the website toy of the day, but I prefer to surf without it if at all possible. I mean, who really wants to be sitting at your computer listening to the cooling fans all spin up because someone couldn’t figure out how to do a sliding menu with something other than flash? And now I get to deal with Flash embedded in PDF files? Fantastic. What will they think of next?
Damm slow in “Creating Flash Preview”. For 904 KB file, its taking around 10 minutes and Don’t ask how much time i waited when i uploaded 58.74 MB file
Buzzword with font support but without kerning is of small benefit — just like Photoshop Express without resize. To me, it looks rather like Adobe is trying to catch up with the format of social web apps without actually grasping their spirit.
Hello all, sorry for the bobble earlier this morning with document sharing on Acrobat.com, the service should be performing again, though we are still mopping up just as traffic is ramping so it may take a bit longer to get back to our targets. It was a simple but costly mistake on our part, literally a one line configuration error…those of you familiar with running services may find that amusing, though it was far from that for us for a couple hours there. I’ll write more about the other comments in a bit, we’re a little busy right now.
-Erik Larson, Adobe Systems
PS to Sean: Folks on the Acrobat.com team won’t hide their identities when posting, so please don’t worry about us astroturfing. That’s not our style…in essence we are an open, humble and hard working group.
Dimdim welcomes Adobe to Free Web Meetings - we’re closer to our vision where the whole world can meet freely.
And if you want to host your own open source Web Meeting server, you can download our new Dimdim Open Source Community Edition “Eagle”, available for free at http://www.Dimdim.com
free and good. thanks
i associate adobe with big bucks, photoshop, and ditsy pdf reader
how does this monetize?
Hey M$!
Why don’t you learn a lesson here?
You fight with products, not with FUD, patents, strongarming, bribes and unethical behavior!
See how easy it is?
No need to denigrate or attack your enemies, just offer good services and we all win.
Are you listening M$?
yes, many of the early replies are from Adobe employees, whether they use their real names or not (I work there and it is common practice to astroturf, regardless of what Erik L. says)
the acrobat.com team has no clue how to monetize this - just another attempt by us to try to make up for the millions and millions that will be lost now the creative suites is losing steam…
Why limit the pdf conversion to just 5 files
Acrobat.com makes a great first impression. The interface quality, aesthetics, and overall usability clearly has Adobe stamp on it. The commenting/ collaboration features of buzzword are far more advanced than Google docs and other offerings. Given that this is only beta launch, I expect the Adobe Share service to improve over time. I use the full-featured Acrobat Connect product very frequently and love its easy to use interface and overall quality. Making Brio available for free is an intelligent step for accelerating market adoption. With today’s launch Adobe has established its intent to be a legit contender in webtop space.
adobe is so sexy
This is pretty amazing. Although, our company currently has Adobe Connect, so I wonder if we’ll keep that subscription with this new free product. Definitely worth checking out though. Thanks,
Jeff
http://www.jeffwoelker.com
Is putting flash in a PDF a good thing? If the point of PDF is to accurately print then how do I go about printing animated documents?
Oh here it comes!
I am new here and looking to have a great time and learning experience
within your community.
Well, now even Adobe has entered into the race with other players in the online office suite race. I’m not sure on how much I can really depend on this suite since it’s so flash heavy needs to be downloaded. Another thing is the productivity level. While new office suites like Zoho and Google, eDeskOnline, Thinkfree being readily available I’d personally rather use any of the above mentioned office suites than use Adobe’s flash dependent online office…
Can’t wait to see the creative things my fellow Flash Developers will come up with. Flash is growing so fast one can hardly keep up.
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