The Acrobat.com Mobile app allows iPhone users
to access shared data and create PDFs
Exclusive to the Examiner: Adobe has a knack for developing successful products and enhancing them over time. Adobe's collaborative on-line tool, Acrobat.com, appears to be no exception.
What sets Acrobat.com apart from all the other collaborative products on the market? According to Mark Grilli, Group Product Manager, "Acrobat.com's collaborative tools were built from the ground up to centerpiece the user experience. With the unified Acrobat.com people can work together either synchronously or asynchronously. This allows users to collaborate as they wish and makes the work process faster and with far less friction.”
Harmonized applications
Mark Grilli stresses that Adobe's intent was to marry the various on-line applications in Acrobat.com thereby unifying the user experience. It's a concept that business users will embrace. Buzzword, the on-line word processor, Presentations, the presentation application, and Tables, the spreadsheet application, will now sport a common user interface.
Improved document organizer
A key to the new Acrobat.com is in something known as “collections.” Users familiar with other Adobe applications, such as Lightroom, will immediately recognize the concept around collections. (For those who are not Adobe users, you can think Apple iTunes playlists—the two concepts are very close in nature.) With collections you can gather, or collect, files from different locations and place them in a common virtual holder without having to move them. For example, I might have several graphic images scattered around in different Acrobat.com locations that I want to use in my Examiner column. I can gather them in an “Examiner Collection” without moving them from their individual locations. They remain at their locations but are completely accessible in the Examiner collections.
According to Lisa Underkoffler, Principal Product Manager, "Users can now sort documents by name, file type, and several other characteristics. Furthermore, users can search for documents by title or do a text based search. This is handy when you have a number of documents and you want to find that certain one needed for a business meeting or presentation."
iPhone and Blackberry capability
Perhaps the most interesting new feature is that Acrobat.com is now accessible from the Apple iPhone and RIM's Blackberry smartphones. Using the Acrobat.com Mobile app, iPhone and Blackberry users can view and share documents and scan documents using their internal cameras. Snap a picture using your iPhone or Blackberry camera and the Acrobat.com app can convert what you photographed to a PDF. It will then store and fax it for you. (How cool is that?) What's the cost for this app? Nothing—it's free for the limited version. (Yes, there is a paid full featured version. Adobe hasn't set the price at press time.) Support for other smartphones will be coming in the future.
What's next?
Next up, but not available in this upgrade, will be Workspaces. The concept behind Workspaces is making user files collaborative. Acrobat.com stores and manages the files to prevent users from colliding with each other when they are working with the same file. If you suspect that in releasing Workspaces, Acrobat.com is taking direct aim at Microsoft's SharePoint application, you'd be right. Adobe expects a Winter 2009 release for Workspaces, so we won't have to wait very long for this to be added to the mix.
The proof of any application, web-based or local, is in its value to the user. In my case, I have found Acrobat.com to be a valuable tool in my day-to-day work arsenal. It makes my 16 GB USB flash drive almost obsolete because virtually everything that I need for my work is at my fingertips no matter where I happen to be at the time. All I need is a Mac, Linux or Windows machine and an Internet connection and I am good to go.
The unified Acrobat.com site will be live for you to try out and use on Saturday, November 21. Click here to go to Acrobat.com
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