Adobe Acrobat.com Ideas & BrightIdea are finalists in the Forrester Groundswell Awards. We're delighted on several levels. The Ideas site has contributed a lot of great ideas, inspiration and the site has helped us in setting priorities for the upcoming release of Acrobat.com. And, it's great to be voted a finalist for the Forrester Research award. The Acrobat.com Ideas site is powered by Brightidea's Webstorm technology.
In a conversation with one of the Adobe staff in the UK, an inspiring although not surprising story was told. He works frequently with a number of departments in the UK Government, and knows quite well that it is typically a long process when updating any sort of policy or procedure, even for minor updates. And so, here's the story... and perhaps a good example for others who may find themselves in the same position.
Do you provide professional services to clients or others outside your company?
If your work involves managing projects and exchanging files with clients or others outside your company, then you're invited to participate in a paid research interview. Documents you exchange may include contracts, legal documents, proposals, offer letters, marketing collateral, project plans, product documentation, and various kinds of agreements (e.g., financial, non-disclosure, etc.). You may work with consumers or businesses of any size.
During each interview, participants will discuss the process for interacting with external parties and the kinds of documents that they exchange. Participants will also evaluate some new product ideas and provide their opinions about them. Interviews will be done individually, not in groups.
We expect this to be an interesting, low-stress opportunity to talk about how you do your work and help evaluate some product ideas.
Study details:
Format: Phone or in-person conversation
Compensation: $100
When: 1.5 hours, Aug 24-31, 2009
Today we take a big step towards realizing our vision of a new way to work on Acrobat.com.
Today we end the public beta for Acrobat.com. We launch Acrobat.com Premium subscriptions for more intensive business use (yes, the free version of the service is still available, and still free :-). And we give a look into the future of Acrobat.com for the coming year, starting with the unveiling of our spreadsheet product, Acrobat.com Tables, on our Labs website. Lots of news! Oh, plus two weeks ago we released Acrobat.com Presentations.
Announcing today - Tables on Acrobat.com Labs. Tables is the most recent addition to Acrobat.com, and joins Presentations and Buzzword. And it's pretty amazing, if we do say so ourselves. Check it out: http://labs.acrobat.com. And don't miss the Crash Course. You'll see what we mean when you open your first table.
It's not that we are smarter or more creative. It's not because we like each other more. It's because we've found a new way to work.
We get more work done, much better than your team, in much less time, because we use Acrobat.com.
And from a personal standpoint, by working this way I get fewer emails and spend less time in meetings, yet I get more done, have more time to think, and enjoy my work and my co-workers more. How does that sound to you?
Let me give you a real world example of how this happens.
Today we announced Acrobat.com Presentations, a new beta service on http://labs.acrobat.com. Imagine the beauty, power and collaboration of Buzzword, only for presentations. I think Anthony Ha at Venture Beat said it pretty well in the first blog posting we saw in the wild, “...there’s a solid core for Adobe to build around…genuinely beautiful…the key feature of Acrobat.com is the collaboration it allows…”
You asked. We listened. Today, we're announcing Acrobat.com Presentations.
This is a Labs Preview of our latest application - Presentations. It's an exciting, new product and we want you to give it a spin!
Our new presentation tool joins Buzzword in the growing ranks of our online collaborative offerings. You can try the public beta version on our labs site (http://labs.acrobat.com). If you already have an Acrobat.com account, you can just sign in. Or, there's free sign up for new users.
Will social networking and instant messages replace the standard business phone call, the client lunch and the handshake? The Acrobat.com team recently completed a survey with Directions Research, Inc. that points toward an evolution in office workplace culture, including the changing ways white-collar workers are interacting and coordinating their tasks, and how business will be conducted in the social media-rich environment of the 21st century.
There has been some commentary about SharePoint over the past couple weeks that helps mark the path we are taking with Acrobat.com, so I thought I would weigh in.
To some extent, Acrobat.com owes its success so far to the SharePoint story. No, we don't use SharePoint, and we don't directly integrate with it either (maybe someday). But SharePoint has introduced people to the promise of better collaboration, or as Thomas Vander Wal said, it is acting as the "gateway drug to enterprise social tools." And at the same time it has opened up an opportunity for Acrobat.com to actually deliver on the promise of better social collaboration at work without the pitfalls that Dion Hinchcliffe recently described as "the issues and challenges of using SharePoint for Enterprise 2.0."
A recent survey we did of Acrobat.com users highlighted the gap between the big promises and meager payoffs of Enterprise 2.0 so far. I think this is the most interesting statistic:
There are as many people who have stopped using SharePoint for sharing and collaborating on documents as there are people currently using it.
It doesn't take long to see the difference between where Google is coming from and where we are going with Acrobat.com. This tweet from a few weeks ago is one pithy perspective:
"I must admit Adobe's Buzzword looks like creamy, fattening butter next to trim, healthy margarine GDocs. But I like butter..." - @mahyuni
I love seeing that sort of emotional response to Buzzword and Acrobat.com. At the risk of dangerously mixing saturated fat and cardiac metaphors, I think the reason people respond so deeply to Acrobat.com, even in its early "unfinished" stage, is that we believe great designs engage both hearts and minds.
Acrobat.com is growing like gang busters, with over 100,000 new people signing up each week. This is happening even though we are still in beta and have a long way to go before the product is "done." Why is this happening, who is using online collaboration to change the way people work together, and what we are doing to make Acrobat.com the best choice out there?
First let me set some context, using a picture from the early 1830s. I first saw a similar picture in a business history class with Professor Richard Tedlow:
From wikipedia:
"The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations ... is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group."
The Acrobat.com Ideas site (http://ideas.acrobat.com) is available now for YOUR ideas, your comments and, very importantly, your VOTES. This is an experiment for us: a new way of gathering ideas, getting feedback on the ideas, and letting you tell us which are the ideas most important to you. Will this be effective? Inspirational? Yes. Absolutely. Please help us explore by adding your ideas. And vote early and often.
The Buzzword team updated our servers today with our 14th release. And, the theme of this version is Easier Document Sharing.
We get a lot of feedback from our users, and at the top of the list has been the request to make our document sharing easier, and more public. So we've tackled both problems. Now it's not only easier to share documents with teams but also publish to the whole world.
ﾠThe Web is a wonderful place; it never stops. Buzzword continues to do frequent releases. The challenge is to keep up with the many and varied requests we receive. The team truly likes to hear from our users - your comments and ideas keep us focused on what's important and give us new points of view.
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Buzzword has come a long way since we first launched the Preview. And there's still a lot we want to do. Here's a look at some of the features that are on the drawing board - some are ideas that came from many of you (thank you!)
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More writing tools:
* As one user wrote to us, "Named styles, named styles, named styles." This is one of the most frequently requested features and it is high on our enhancement list
* Tools to track changes made by each co-author
* Justified text, in addition to left, right and centered text
* Import and export of Open Document format (ODT)
* More fonts (please see the posting on why there is a small number of fonts in Buzzword)
* Table enhancements - merged cells, more formatting options
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Organizing your documents:
* Folders for grouping and organizing your documents
* Tagging documents for search
* Search within the organizerﾠ
And more:
* Spell check dictionaries for languages other than US English
* An off-line version of Buzzword
* and many, many more smaller enhancements
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The Buzzword team has been releasing new features on a regular basis since our debut last summer. Our users get the benefit of new functionality as it's ready. Each time you sign in to Buzzword, the latest and greatest is there - no installations, no upgrades, it just works.ﾠ
Please, keep the dialog going. Tell us what you need and what you think would make Buzzword a better solution for your work. The Buzzword forum is open!
Here's a quick update after the first week of Acrobat.com. The response has been terrific, in terms of new users, site visits and press reviews. We want to express our thanks to everyone who tried out our new service - we're going to continue working hard to earn your loyalty, tuning and enhancing our capabilities. But we couldn't have asked for a better start.
Our tracking software has been working hard this week, trying to keep up with all the activity. One interesting statistic is this one: the software looks at 214 countries, and in our first week we had visitors from 210. The top 10 countries are shown below:
Come on, all you folks in North Korea, Turkmenistan, the Central African Republic and Liberia! We're just four countries away from having global representation.
Wow, glad to have that behind us, now back to work changing the way people work, for the better!
Thanks for all the attention, but you people should stop surfing the web over breakfast coffee and before and after lunch, and spread your tire-kicking out a little! Just kidding, that's life on the web and we were mostly ready for it, but it is pretty tense watching the sun rise over the world on a launch day like Monday.
I'll come back to more details on the "mostly" stuff and lessons learned sometime soon, but I wanted to give a quick update on how things are going, and clarify some stray memes about Acrobat.com that are flying around on the series of tubes serving the web.
We are incredibly excited about the path we've started down with today's beta launch of Acrobat.com. Our goal for the next few years is big but simple: we want to change the way the world works together on documents, for the better. We’ll keep you up to date on our thoughts and progress through frequent (and usually shorter ;-) postings to this blog.
Acrobat.com is a suite of online services hosted by Adobe that you can use to create documents together and share them with others. It helps people get document work done faster, without email attachments or version confusion, and it makes your documents look great so that you and your work look great, too.
We are starting with three distinctive applications:
Adobe Buzzword for creating and reviewing documents together.
Adobe ConnectNow for holding full-fledged online web conferences with up to three people.
The Acrobat.com organizer for sharing 5GB of files with others online, including the ability to convert 5 documents to PDF and embed your documents in blogs, wikis or other web pages.
Please give them a try, get more efficient, and let us know what you think. You can sign up for free at www.acrobat.com.
It has been a really long time since we last spoke to you. The Share team has been busy adding new features and improving performance of Share Beta. And today we released a new version of Share with a whole host of new features.
The first thing you will notice when you login to the Share Beta service is the new button bar at the top.
We have eliminated the Home tab which was in the previous version of the service to give more focus to your documents in the Share library. The three buttons are the primary tasks supported by the Share service: Uploading files, Sharing files and Converting Files to PDFs. Yes, creating PDFs!ﾠ
Now you can convert documents to Adobe PDF using Share! Adobe PDF is the de facto standard for more secure, dependable electronic information exchange — recognized by industries and governments around the world. By converting your files to Adobe PDF you can ensure that recipients will be able to view your files regardless of platform and application availability. To convert a file to PDF simply select the file from your desktop or by dragging-and-dropping a file already in your Share library.
Once the PDF conversion is completed you can directly Share the converted file or copy the URL or copy the embed code for the file. Share supports converting to PDF all the popular formats including: Microsoft Office files, Open Office files, text files, images and postscript files.
We’re often asked the question: “Buzzword is free for now, but how long will it remain free?” So, let’s begin by making this as clear as possible: Buzzword is now, and will remain, free - no cost, free of charge, gratis and complimentary. If you read no further, trust us on this: we want Buzzword used as broadly as possible, with minimal barriers to adoption, so keeping it free *is* critical.
The waits over and we are sharing more! We have started sending out invites to join the service, by sharing files through the Share :-)...off course. Everyone who added their email address to our waiting list should receive an invite by the end of this week. General sign-up for Share will be opened up next week.
Enjoy Share and continue to give us your feedback about the service.
Shahram Javey, engineering manager for the Share team here at Adobe, built a very cool service using the Share REST APIs. The service allows accessing your Share Library, viewing documents and sharing documents all from your iPhone. Check it out at http://web.sharepdf.com. He talks about this in his blog.
This is really exciting and highlights the extensibility of the service. Shahram was able to take the vanilla Share APIs and build a prototype using these APIs in a just a couple of days. This is exactly the types of scenarios we have envisioned in opening up the service for use by developers and third parties service providers.
It was last Tuesday (Oct 2nd) that we unveiled the Share service at the keynote address at MAX. Wow! What a busy past week it was, we got a lot of great coverage in the press and the blogosphere. Want to thank everyone who have started using Share, sent us feedback on enhancements they would like to see in the service. Also special thanks to those who have expressed an interest in getting an account on Share, we will be sending out additional invites soon.
Ever search for an email attachment with little success? Work on a document only to find out it wasn't the latest version? Couldn't send a file by email because the size of the file was too large? We all have these challenges too...We need an easy and simple way to share important documents internally and externally.
We'd like to think that Buzzword represents a new application category that could be called Rich Collaborative Authoring. Though this isn't a popular buzzword, and probably never will be, it explains a niche that Buzzword fits nicely and one we think is important.
Let's start with the basics: writing has always been a killer app. However, Rich Authoring goes farther than basic writing by allowing for more expressiveness and polish. Here you have more ways to express yourself than plain text, including graphics and other media. You also have more control over the look of the final product, including layout, pagination, spacing and typography.
Word and similar desktop applications are essentially the only tools that currently enable Rich Authoring. This involves providing a rich canvas through which users can express themselves, supported by a page / typography engine that structures and lays out one’s content. But Word is essentially desk-bound, so collaboration becomes a manual and often awkward process.
We've designed Buzzword for people who a) write a lot; b) need access to their documents and tools in more than one place; c) collaborate with others when writing by soliciting comments and peer editing; d) do not have an IT department supporting their computing environment.
And, very importantly, we designed Buzzword for people who care about how their documents look.
Word processing is the most-used of the desktop office applications and those of us on the Virtual Ubiquity team have been in that business for a long time. Some of us have built word and text processors for Lotus, Atex, Interleaf, Trellix, and Texet. Others have worked on collaborative software like Notes, eRoom, and QuickTopic.
And we've all used word processors like Wang, WordStar, Word Perfect, Lotus Manuscript, Volkswriter, PFSWrite. But, my guess is that many reading this have heard of few of these.
There's a reason for that - word processors live and die with their platforms.
