Printer Friendly Version

Rick Treitman has gone from being an entrepreneur to an "entrepreneur in residence." That's the unusual title he's held since his company, Virtual Ubiquity, and its prize product, Buzzword, were acquired by Adobe at the end of 2007.

Buzzword is now the cornerstone of Acrobat.com, Adobe's new online suite of tools (now in beta), and it just might change the way you collaborate on documents.

An online word processor, Adobe Buzzword offers a level of convenience that locally stored apps can't touch. You can store documents on the site and set granular control over who can view or edit each file. Adding or removing collaborators is simple. Helpful viewing options let you see documents sorted by their primary owner or by when they were last changed. Documents with a red mark on their icons have been edited by another user since you last viewed them, making it easy to see exactly what's changed.

Collaboration is at the heart of Acrobat.com. While Buzzword certainly doesn't match Microsoft Word feature-for-feature, it offers collaboration tools that make it easy to work in a group. It saves multiple versions of documents with a handy interface that lets you see changes from minutes ago or weeks ago, whichever you need. You can also see which person in the group made each save, so you can tell who introduced changes.

Buzzword can also import and create local files, for times when it's not convenient to work online. It can import Word documents, but since it only has eight font families you might see formatting changes on imported files. Treitman says Adobe plans to introduce more fonts in the future. Buzzword also doesn't create footnotes yet, so it converts them to endnotes when it finds them. You can export Buzzword files to Word documents, RTF, HTML, plain text, and PDF, among other formats.

The Acrobat.com Family

Buzzword is only one part of Acrobat.com, a suite that's built on Flash (not surprisingly) and is accessible on any platform. The suite also includes Adobe ConnectNow, an online meeting space for instant Web cam communications. ConnectNow offers the basics of online meetings, including screen sharing, notes, and whiteboards.

The suite also includes online storage, so that you can save and exchange any type of file. At the moment, users will get 5GB of storage. The sharing features should appeal to people who are tired of using FTP and who need to exchange files too large for e-mail. You can share stored files with one person or with an entire list.

Besides being able to create PDFs in Acrobat.com, users can also view them directly through the suite, without opening Adobe Reader first.

Adobe plans to introduce more collaboration features in the future, and might one day support editing more types of documents, said Treitman, although there's nothing to announce yet.

Acrobat.com is currently free while in beta, offering ConnectNow meetings for three people and 5GB of online storage. When the product formally launches, there will be higher-level premium options, but Treitman said there will always be a free version offering at least as much as is currently available.

Printer Friendly Version