Now a full year later, Adobe is turning up the heat on its competitors with a series of big announcements. First, Acrobat.com is coming out of beta. Second, business subscriptions are going live. And third, it's releasing an advanced tool to build spreadsheets, on top of the Presentations program it released last month. So what does Acrobat.com offer to the user? And is it something you should be using? Let's take a look:
The New Acrobat.com
Adobe has been very busy since it launched Acrobat.com in 2008. When we
Acrobat.com is divided into several sub-products. Here's the new line-up as of today:
Buzzword: Acquired by Adobe in 2007, Buzzword is Adobe's version of Microsoft Word. It's a full-featured, collaboration document-building tool. It looks and feels slick, as it runs entirely in flash.
ConnectNow: ConnectNow is a tool for running virtual meetings, sharing desktops, and presenting PowerPoints virtually. It's similar to GoToMeeting.
Create PDF/Share: Exactly as it says, it's a tool to create and share PDF files.
Presentations: Released May 27th, Presentations is a beta tool for collaboratively building presentations with up to 20 people.
Spreadsheets: Released today, Acrobat.com's Spreadsheets tool allows multiple users to create a fully-functional spreadsheet or excel document.
They key points about all of these tools is that they run in flash, focus on deep business collaboration, have tools to assure that collaboration is done in real-time to avoid people editing each other's work, and provide a full range of tools needed to meet business needs.
One important note: Acrobat.com does not support Google Chrome currently. While a small segment of the population use Chrome currently, it does make us sad.
Acrobat.com's Future
Adobe linked the release of Spreadsheets to the end of its public beta and the beginning of subscriptions. While there will still be free accounts on Acrobat.com, businesses that want support and more team members to collaborate can purchase a monthly plan: premium basic and premium plus. Basic goes for $14.99 a month, while plus is $39 a month, although it's cheaper if you buy a year's worth. Basic can handle 5 people on web meetings, while plus can handle 20 participants (correction: there is no limit to collaboration on a document).
So to the question you're probably asking: is Acrobat.com better than Google Docs? While everyone has their own preferences, Acrobat.com is an impressive and surprisingly feature-rich tool. While Google Docs is better for personal or project use, Acrobat.com is designed for serious business challenges. Creating documents, holding a virtual conference, and making PDFs can be performed in one fell swoop. The collaboration features work very well, once you master the learning curve of course.