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If your work involves collaborating on documents with other team members or people outside your organization, take a long look at Adobe Acrobat 7. Sure, the professional version of Acrobat 6 had useful collaboration tools, but they only worked if everyone you were collaborating with had Acrobat 6 Pro, an expensive proposition for smaller shops. With Acrobat 7 Pro, Adobe has unlocked the vault, bringing collaboration to the masses.

That's because the beautifully designed Acrobat 7 Pro requires that only the person sending out a document for collaboration have the professional version. The recipients can use the free Adobe Reader 7 and still get the collaboration tools of Acrobat 7 Pro.

When you're ready to share a document in Acrobat 7 Pro, you use a wizard to send it to the recipients. They'll get the PDF file, which contains an electronic token that unlocks collaboration tools for that document only. The file will display along with a toolbar of collaboration tools and instructions indicating how to make changes. Besides altering the text, recipients can add sticky notes or record audio comments.

When your recipients are finished, they simply click a button within Reader 7 to send the document back. You'll get their files and have the option to merge them into one master file. When you do, you'll see which changes each person made and have the ability to accept or reject the changes individually.

If that was the only collaboration improvement to Acrobat 7, it would still deserve attention, but there's plenty more. Both the standard and pro versions let you merge a variety of documents types into one PDF document. You can bind together Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Access, AutoCAD, Visio, and Internet Explorer pages, among others. When you include Web pages, Acrobat maintains dynamic or streaming content, as well as Web links. Besides those document formats, Acrobat 7 can also bundle Outlook messages into a PDF. It's an excellent way to keep all your project files in one place.

With Acrobat 7 Pro, you can send a document made from multiple file types out for review and not worry if your recipients have the right tool to open it. They won't need Visio, AutoCAD, PowerPoint, or the rest, because the document will open with Reader, which is on virtually all machines. The PDF file is merely the container that makes exchanging a variety of file types possible.

When combined with Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server, Acrobat 7 Standard and Pro gain standout security features that will put your mind at ease about sharing information outside your organization. The server allows you to put usage restrictions on your PDF files, such as not allowing others to extract text or images from the files or not letting others print the files. It's a way of keeping control over a document even once it's been sent. You can even track where a document travels over its whole life cycle.

Adobe Acrobat 7 Standard costs $99 to upgrade or $299 to purchase, while Acrobat 7 Pro is $159 to upgrade and $449 to purchase. Volume licensing discounts are available for both.

With Adobe Acrobat 7 Pro's collaboration tools, recipients can open a shared document in Reader 7 and still get the ability to review and edit PDF files.