Acrobat.com Goes Live, Rivals Google Docs

We have to give Adobe credit for successfully taking its desktop business Web 2.0-side. This year alone, we’ve seen the launch of Adobe AIR and Photoshop Express, its free photo editor. Today, the company unveiled Acrobat.com, a free site allowing for document and PDF creation and real-time collaboration, much like Google Docs. The site runs on Adobe Flash 9 and Adobe says it works with all popular browsers. At a glance, here’s what you can expect:

Adobe Buzzword

This online word processor allows users to create documents and invite multiple people to edit in real-time. Each editor’s comments appear in a different color and, as with Google Docs, there’s a pane showing who’s currently editing and reading. Users can assign colleagues one of three statuses: Co-author (full editing privileges), Reviewer (comments only), and Reader (read-only). There are also plenty of options for organizing documents: For example, users can set aside documents whose latest versions they haven’t seen.

Adobe ConnectNow

This is a particularly business-centric feature you won’t find in Google Docs. This service allows for multimedia Web conferences. With a click of a button, users can share their screens, distribute materials, show videos, and interact through built-in VoIP. Other features include live note taking, remote control of one another’s desktops, and traditional instant messaging.

Share

When authors choose to share documents, the recipients will receive a link to the file on Acrobat.com. Users can make their files public or specify recipients, who don’t have to have Acrobat.com accounts, but must authenticate their e-mail addresses to view the document. The site also has a built-in previewer so people don’t have to launch Acrobat Reader to read an embedded document.