Monday 2 June sees Adobe releasing two new products: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9, emphasising the company's intent to become a major provider in the world of Webtop software.Adobe's release of the new software is another large step for the company, bringing experiences that were traditionally desktop based to the Web. Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9 join the online version of Photoshop and the online media player, Adobe T.V, in Adobe's impressive, and growing, Webtop arsenal.
Acrobat.com sees Adobe using a combination of three recently launched online services, namely Adobe Brio (used for online meetings), Adobe Buzzword (online word processor) and Adobe Share (online file sharing). The beta launch of Acrobat.com will see Adobe bravely stepping up to take on the considerable combined Webtop influence of Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx and GoTo Meeting, all at the same time.
Adobe's document and file sharing service now offers users 5 gigabytes of free storage and users can embed documents in a widget on other sites across the Web, a feature that's sure to worry start-up services such as Scribd which is based almost entirely on uploading and sharing documents in much the same way.
Another huge selling point of Acrobat.com is Brio, a lighter version of Adobe's Acrobat Connect. This Webtop application allows up to three people to have online meeting and conferences for free with a number of handy features including voice conferencing, desktop video and chat all thrown in. With this application already getting favourable reviews ("Anyone with a Mac is going to love this." - TechCrunch) some have implied that WebEx and GoTo Meeting should be looking over their shoulders
Adobe has also performed a huge upgrade to one of its best known desktop applications, Acrobat 9. For the first time, Adobe's PDF creating software will support Flash, meaning documents can be supplemented with embedded Flash movies from sites such as YouTube, with Adobe's Flex framework (the same tool they use to create Web applications) allowing users to design new skins for electronic documents. However, the real coup de grace for Adobe will be to develop Acrobat further and make it easy to turn any PDF into a web page and vice versa, something which is sure to be in the works for the future.
