Acrobat.com

We're pleased to announce that Share, Buzzword, and ConnectNow have new Help systems. Help now includes the following additional features:
• Search (within both the product and community content). A tip in all services explains how to get the best search results.
• PDFs for each Help service. Click the link at the top right of any page to download the PDF.
• New navigation. Click links in the table of contents or within long articles to jump to specific topics. Use page forward and backward icons to page through the content. Click links in the upper left to open another Help system.
• Survey links on each page. This unique survey for each service will help Adobe improve the Help content.

Continue reading "New Help systems for Acrobat.com" »

We're pleased to report that the newly announced Creative Suite will add collaboration capabilities offered by Acrobat.com.

Creative professionals will be able to work with others in real time using ConnectNow without leaving the Creative Suite 4 workspace and with no need for IT support or a company-wide web conferencing solution.

You can now access your ConnectNow meeting room directly from within CS4 applications to meet live over the web to share your screen, present creative concepts and ideas, and brainstorm with up to two online guests for no additional service charge. To share your screen with colleagues and clients from within most Creative Suite 4 products, choose File > Share My Screen. Guests can then see your desktop on their screens as you work. You can exchange ideas using the chat pod, add a live video or audio feed, or use the Whiteboard feature to enable guests to comment on content. You can even temporarily hand over control of the screen to a guest to collaborate on a file.

As an added convenience, Acrobat.com on Adobe AIR will be included with most of the Creative Suites, so you can launch ConnectNow from your desktop and use other Acrobat.com services including convenient file upload, storage and sharing of large files.

This post looks at some of the ways in which PDF files can be used with Acrobat.com. In addition to offering the ability to create five PDFs, there are a number of ways that Acrobat.com helps you work with PDF files.

Continue reading "PDF Support in Acrobat.com and Buzzword" »

At a recent education conference, it was gratifying to hear several stories from Acrobat.com users, detailing how they use our applications to work together more effectively.

One of the common threads was the degree to which Acrobat.com enabled the workflow required in developing electronic materials. This was a pleasant surprise to hear - as you've probably seen, we focus quite a bit on collaboration. However, we have not yet explicitly developed capabilities that facilitate workflow. This would include things like mapping out the steps in a process, assigning tasks based on roles, supporting complete annotation of the process throughout, etc.

Continue reading "Acrobat.com Collaboration Workflow" »

(This entry is authored by Ruchi Kumar, a graduate student at the School of Information at UC Berkeley, working as a business systems analyst here at Adobe for a summer internship.)

So who does the Acrobat.com services benefit? One possible scenario is for students at grad schools (like me!). Many courses are project oriented with typical team sizes of 3-4 people. This brings up the scheduling issue - with everyone having their own busy schedules and priorities, it gets difficult to setup a time and space where all can physically meet. In the past, we were forced to juggle with a wide range of collaboration tools to solve these concerns.

Continue reading "A great way to accomplish a school project!" »

Today's Workplace Challenges
These days it's becoming much more common for people to work with other people who aren't in the same location. There are many challenges that come with this. You no longer have the luxury of walking over to someone's office or cube and having a face-to-face conversation. You no longer have team meetings in the same room where you can gauge people's reactions to what you are saying, see if they are following along, or brainstorm new ideas on a white board. You can't help feeling one step removed from the people you are meeting with when all you hear is their voice and try to follow along with what people are talking about.

So what can you do to improve the quality of your day-to-day interactions and meetings? That's where using web conferencing comes in. It can dramatically improve your meetings and ad hoc collaboration by providing a visual representation of what you are talking about, bring the physical presence of the people to the meeting with web cams, and provide a place to capture meeting notes, share files and brainstorm ideas. With ConnectNow, web conferencing is now accessible to anyone. It's free, sign up now!

For a hands-on look at ConnectNow, join me tomorrow for a live seminar at 11:30 EDT, 8:30 PDT. See our forum for session details.

Here are a few ideas on how you can make the most of your real-time collaboration sessions using ConnectNow.

Continue reading "Effective Real-Time Collaboration in Today's Workplace Using ConnectNow" »

If you've been following the Acrobat.com press, or reading our marketing materials, or checking our blog and forum, you've seen that we are very focused on enabling collaboration - especially when documents are involved. Here's a quick look at the ways we enable collaboration.

Collaboration in Authoring
The story begins with document authoring, and in Buzzword we've heard countless people indicate that Buzzword is the finest online writing experience currently available. Many have told us they've even abandoned Word - some use the expression "liberated" - in favor of Buzzword as their primary writing environment.

Buzzword is indeed a simple and elegant word processor, but it really differentiates from Word and other desktop applications when you want to collaborate with others in the writing process. Instead of pushing documents out to others via email, you simply invite your collaborators to the only instance of the document, online, where they can contribute content or just add comments.

With everyone working on the same document, rather than multiple, disparate copies of the document, then collaboration is smoother and you can keep track of everyone's involvement. The image below shows the Buzzword collaborator bar, which displays who has read the document, when they read it and which version they read. Now that's getting everyone on the same page!

Continue reading "Document Collaboration" »