Adobe Systems has announced Acrobat.com has moved out of public beta and will offer two new paid subscription services that add capacity and capabilities for intensive business use. Planned features for Acrobat.com include shared team workspaces and smartphone access, as well as a spreadsheet-like application, Acrobat.com Tables, which joins the recently announced Presentations application on Acrobat.com Labs.
“Acrobat.com hopes to become the online destination for team collaboration, with the tools business people need to get work done faster, together, from anywhere. Our customers have moved from e-mailing multiple versions of documents back and forth to collaborating on documents directly in a fluid online environment,” said Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president, Adobe’s Business Productivity Business Unit. “Over the next 12 months, we will continue to add simple-to-use team collaboration capabilities that establish a new way to work, while removing barriers to getting work done within and across companies and around the world.”
Adobe is announcing two new Acrobat.com Premium subscription services that address the intense collaboration needs of business people, enabling them to be more productive by bringing them to documents to work together in real-time, rather than sending attachments to inboxes and invitations to calendars. Available today, both Premium offerings include Adobe phone and Web support programs. The Premium Basic service includes Adobe ConnectNow Web meeting capacity for up to five participants and online conversion of 10 uploaded documents to PDF per month. The Premium Plus service includes ConnectNow Web meeting capacity for up to 20 participants and unlimited online creation of PDF files. The free service will continue to offer Adobe Buzzword online word processing, ConnectNow Web meeting capacity for up to three participants, and online creation of up to five PDF files.
In support of the Acrobat.com vision, Adobe has also announced the preview release of Acrobat.com Tables, a spreadsheet-like application that is available immediately for free sign-up as a public beta, joining the Acrobat.com Presentations application on Acrobat.com Labs.
Acrobat.com Tables provides people with a new way to work with others on data-intensive documents – such as task lists, schedules, contacts, budgets and sales numbers – that are typically created and shared in spreadsheets or simple databases. People can easily work with others on the same table at the same time, without the worry of version control or e-mailing spreadsheets back and forth. Because the table lives online, people can access and work on the data from any Internet-connected computer, regardless of where they are located.