Acrobat.com Online

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.