Adobe Acrobat v9: Collaboration is King

by David Heath

Monday, 02 June 2008

Adobe has today announced the new Acrobat V9. Scheduled for availability in around a month’s time, this version makes a very strong play for the collaborative workplace.

With native support for Flash built right into the Acrobat reader, Adobe has enabled rich-content PDF portfolios.

Imagine embedded Flash objects right inside a PDF file – played seamlessly without recourse to an external application.

Further, the Portfolio concept can be extended to include all kinds of media into a single package – documents, video, audio etc. Standard templates (or ones created by the package developer) can be used to control navigation through the various elements.

Beyond portfolios, Adobe has made a substantial improvement in the collaborative components as well. Acrobat is capable of integrating forms, work-flow and document management.

Underpinning all of this is the new Acrobat.com collaborative website. This provides a tightly integrated set of hosted services. Freely, up to three users can connect to a shared conference location on the website and conduct a live walk-through of the pre-distributed PDF file. In fact this can be done without any of the three owning any software at all.

The website can also be used to host workflow-styled forms or even used as a custom form-filling environment. Think feedback or on-line exams, all with full database control, allowing analysis of responses. There is also an on-line word processor (called Buzzword) that enables co-authoring and high-quality print results.

Additionally, acrobat.com offers up to 1GB of storage for free to all registered users. For an extra payment, extra space is available, as is the ability to add more users to the collaborative conference environment.

So, who should be scared right now? If I were Citrix, I’d be seeing a big competitor to my GoToMeeting product. Similarly for all the on-line meeting vendors. Alternately, any of the voice conference call vendors should be very happy!

Oh, and there’s also a converter to take in PowerPoint presentations and turn them into PDF multimedia experiences.

This is a quick heads-up on an exciting new release. Expect a more detailed review in a few days.

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