Adobe recently released a new set of office applications online to compete with the dominant Google Docs, Zoho and possibly Windows Office Live.
It was released alongside Adobe Flash9 and received a small amount of coverage, so I decided to have a quick look at what it offered.
Acrobat.com contains 5 services, 3 of which previously existed as Adobe Buzzword (Word Processing), Adobe Brio (Collaboration) and Adobe Share (File sharing). Acrobat doesn’t offer a complete office suite replacement as the lack of spreadsheets and presentations are a notable omission.
Instead Acrobat.com provides a way to create, publish, share, collaborate on and discuss documents with other people. In fact it does this better then any other free online service I can think of, although it’s worth remembering this is still a beta release so expect some issues.
Aside from the three services mentioned Acrobat also has My Files which is a file manager with a generous 5 gigabytes and Create PDF which can convert up to 5 files at a time into Adobe PDF. A 200mb limit is imposed but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. It supports all major formats (Microsoft Office, Open Office, Star Office and image files).
For me the best feature is the AIR application for desktop access, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support offline synchronisation and access.
I’m going to keep using Google Docs for now but I think this will definitely be one to watch.
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Well, now even Adobe has entered into the race with other players in the online office suite race. I’m not sure on how much I can really depend on this suite since it’s so flash heavy needs to be downloaded. Another thing is the productivity level. While new office suites like eDeskOnline, being readily available I’d personally rather use the above mentioned office suite than use Adobe’s flash dependent online office…