Adobe takes Acrobat.com out of beta, launches paid subscriptions

Jake Widman
Tuesday, 16 June 2009 01:05

Business IT - Technology

Acrobat.com Tables runs on Flash 10 and provides browser-based access to basic spreadsheet and database features.

But as part of Acrobat.com, it also enables more than one person to work on the same document at the same time.

Users can even create their own personal views of the shared document, so that they can see the information they need without affecting the work of their collaborators.

Tables, like the Presentations application introduced on May 27, is available through Adobe Labs .

With its minimalist black-and-gray interface, Tables also looks immediately like an Adobe Air application.

Air is Adobe's platform for building rich Internet applications, and the word processor component of Acrobat.com's software suite, Buzzword, actually debuted as an Adobe Air application.

It's not hard to see the direction Adobe is going: browser-based online collaboration tools that can also be spun out into Air applications that enable users to access their online documents outside the browser.

This is, of course, a market that Google, Zoho, and Microsoft have all also set their eyes on.