Collabo.com

This week Microsoft Office 2010 was released as a technical preview for testers. New collaboration features will be the highlight of Office 2010 applications. Unified and real-time communication products are proliferating throughout the market and Microsoft is hoping to keep pace, along with it’s strong grip on the business world.

Unified Communication – While working in Microsoft Office 2010 you will be able to keep track of which colleagues are online, working on a project, and available to chat or join a meeting.

Real-Time Document Collaboration & Co-Authoring Projects – Everyone knows emailing a document around the office for corrections and approvals can easily turn into a multitude of out-of-sync copies. New features in Office 2010 will allow you to see who is working on a specific document. Groups and permissions can be set to allow specific users to edit sections of a document.

Remote Access – Office files such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides stored in the cloud will be available remotely from smartphones or any Web-browser enabled device.

The ship date for Office 2010 can be expected around third quarter next year. Along with the full-featured suite, Microsoft will be offering a limited Web-based free version of Office 2010 where users can access documents via the browser, and not just Internet Explorer.

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.