By Yara Omar, Janus Networks
Adobe Systems has recently released Acrobat.com Beta; a new website that offers a number of “free” services that many small-business owners and individuals find interesting. They include an online word processor, a PDF converter, a web-conferencing tool, file storage with sharing capabilities.
“Adobe Buzzword”, the online word processor, enables users to write their documents online and let others work on them as well. Users can invite anyone for collaboration, defining their roles (co-author, reviewer or reader). The processor imports and exports DOC, DOCX, TXT and RTF formats while it only exports to HTML and PDF. Buzzword enables image insertion, bullets and tables and many of the capabilities of other online word processors.
“Adobe ConnectNow” is the web-conferencing tool Adobe offers on the new website. ConnectNow enables chatting with voice and video, screen sharing, video-conferencing, whiteboarding and remote access. ConnectNow could be opened while working with Buzzword in a separate window. For meetings, the attendees do not need to have their own accounts on Acrobat.com and can be just guests.
The website also offers the ability of converting up to 5 documents (Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents) to PDF format. There is also a file storage capability for up to 5GB of files that could be shared with anyone.
The full version of Adobe Acrobat 9 will be out next July with a set of new features including the ability to combine various multimedia formats into PDFs. Though these features are not available on Acrobat.com, still the services it offers are very useful to almost everybody once they sign-up there.