Collabo.com

Adobe understands that collaboration is much more about people than it is about technology and has designed Acrobat.com to be easy to use yet powerful. Acrobat.com offers a suite of web-based collaboration applications focused on helping business people solve business problems. “Acrobat.com is poised to become the online destination for team collaboration,” says Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president, Adobe Business Productivity Unit. This week Adobe ends the public beta and the future of Acrobat.com begins.

Moving out of public beta means Acrobat.com is now offering premium subscription services for businesses, with a limited free service still available. Premium Basic and Plus subscriptions both offer online word processing, unlimited file downloads, and premium 1-on-1 tech support, but the Basic plan ($149/year) only allows 10 PDF files to be created per month and a 5 person web conference capacity while the Plus plan ($390/year) offers unlimited PDFs and a 20 person capacity.

Over the next year Adobe has plans to release new features at Acrobat.com including more real-time collaboration tools for documents, a new interface, shared team workspaces, mobile access, social media style updates, integration with desktop tools, and increased support for the development community.

For those of us that frequently create PowerPoint style presentations with a colleague or in a team, we know the mundane task of creating slides, emailing them to our colleague to review, then they email them back with changes, rinse, repeat, blah… Not only is this workflow model sub-par, problems that often arise include formatting issues, email file-size limitations, and the general lack of unified communication and collaboration within the whole process. Luckily now there is a better way thanks to Adobe Presentations.
 
Adobe recently released Presentations as an addition to their Acrobat.com suite of web-based collaboration tools. The optimized workflow model allows you to collaborate in real-time on presentations with one or multiple team members. The ability to simultaneously work on slides and build presentations eliminates the need for a group to all be huddled around the same computer, but delivers the feeling of a team effort.
 
Not only can you collaborate to create the presentation, you can also deliver your presentation from the same platform. Invite co-workers or clients from remote locations and save time and money on travel. Additionally you can modify your presentation as you receive feedback from your audience.
 
Other collaboration tools available in the Acrobat.com suite include file sharing and storage, document collaboration with Adobe Buzzword, PDF conversion, and screen sharing with Adobe ConnectNow.