Adobe Releases Acrobat.com Out Of Beta

Adobe has released its Acrobat.com out of beta. Acrobat.com is a document collaboration service that serves as an online alternative to Microsoft Office for businesses. Adobe’s news could directly hit at Microsoft’s dominance in the productivity software market. Moreover, there are high prospects that the service would appeal to the professionals already using Adobe’s creativity software like graphic designers. Evidence of Acrobat.com’s popularity lies in Adobe announced that 5 million people have signed up to use the service since its release in beta a year ago.   Let’s take a look at the key features of Acrobat.com

Key Features

Acrobat.com includes a collaborative word processing application called Buzzword. It allows the user to adjust page layout and presentation and to save in multiple formats, such as Microsoft Word, HTLM, XML, and PDF.

Adobe has added a preview release of collaborative spreadsheet-like application called Tables. Adobe also released the preview of an application that enables the users to work-together on a presentations. You can preview the applications without paying any additional charge.

Over the next 12 months, Adobe would be working to add more features to Acrobat.com. The features would include shared team workspaces and smartphone access.

Improvement in Service

To improve the service, Adobe would be offer

• Real-time document collaboration tools
• A more streamlined interface
• Social network-style updates about the documents people are working on
• Greater integration with desktop tools including Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Adobe products

Basic Service

Adobe systems would offer two subscription service for online collaboration environment. The basic service would charge $14.99 a month or $ 149 a year. The package includes converting up to 10 documents a month into popular PDF format. For more the subscribers will be able to hold web meetings of up to five people.

Premium Service

The premium service would charge $39 a month or $399 a year. It would also offer unlimited number of document conversions to PDF and up to Web meeting participants. There was up to 20 Web meeting participants.

Competitors

Adobe has several competitors in the online document collaboration market that includes free versions services such as Google Docs. Some of the other competitors are Zoho and TextFlow.