Adobe Systems, one of my favorite companies will move its Acrobat.com Web-based productivity and collaboration services out of beta and offer for-fee subscriptions. Acrobat hopes that this will be a new way for business users to collaborate on document creation.
Acrobat.com offers services such as a word processing application called Buzzword, a Web meeting application called Adobe Connect Now and Presentations, an application similar to Microsoft’s Office PowerPoint for building presentations.
This is a smart move Adobe has made, shifting their presence in the desktop space into the web-based services space offering the same level of powerful applications. Web-based services that compete with packaged software like Microsoft Office and IBM Lotus are becoming more prevalent. Google and others also have offerings in this market. Adobe, based on its history in the document-creation and management market, has a strong position to rival Office among business users, which seems to be the objective behind Acrobat.com.
Adobe is offering two subscription levels for Acrobat.com, Premium Basic and Premium Plus. Both are available as either a monthly or annual subscription.
Acrobat.com is not just aimed at giving business users an alternative to packaged software like Microsoft Office, but in the long run Adobe wants it to help people collaborate on documents in a new way. The services in Acrobat.com allow multiple people to work on and edit documents simultaneously with continuous updating so the documents are always current, and give people a view into who’s working on what parts of the document when and an ability to communicate with each other from within the application, he said.
The end result provides people with a more efficient and generally more enjoyable way to collaborate on document creation and generation, allowing people to cut down on the number of meetings or e-mails creating a business document requires. A benefit that most organizations would love to see where it can have a lesser number of meetings and more concrete work done by the staff.
Adobe hopes Acrobat.com will provide simple, easy-to-use tools for collaboration so people will actually enjoy working together when using them. For any organization that is currently using Adobe products, makes this a natural progression with very little convincing required. For half the cost, they can use a range of products anytime on-line. Its quite a sweet deal!
Behind Adobe is Google with the upcoming online collaboration tool “Google Wave” which I wrote about last week that will surely test the quality of service of Acrobat.com. As we all know Google can make you work hard to stay in the competition and in a way with Wave, Acrobat.com has a reason to stay better and ahead of the game as often as possible. |
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