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.
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.
Last week Adobe announced the availability of Adobe Reader 9. This new version of Reader has several exciting new features and capabilities. Steve Gottwals, product manager for Adobe Reader, did an extensive review of the new features of Reader 9 in his blog entry. From the Adobe website you can download a copy of Adobe Reader 9.0 now.
Adobe Reader 9 provides many simple ways to work with Acrobat.com. It includes the Acrobat.com desktop application built on the Adobe AIR technology. The Acrobat.com desktop application provides an easy way of interacting with Acrobat.com by dragging and dropping files and folders from your local computer directly into your Acrobat.com account, and browsing, previewing, sharing or publishing files directly from your desktop computer. The application can be minimized to a widget on your desktop providing one-click access to the Acrobat.com services.
This week's seminar on Document Services will be hosted by Fang Chang, and directed more toward developers and technical management.
Acrobat.com's Document Services provide a standards-based way for developers to easily add collaboration features - store, manage, and share documents - to new and existing applications. Using our Document Services, developers and their users can access files from anywhere there is an Internet connection. Learn more at our Developer Center.
Today's seminar is at 11:30 EDT / 8:30 PDT. To join the seminar, simply go to http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/aclearn/. Sign in as a guest and you will be taken to a ConnectPro room. The room will be opened 15 minutes before the start of the session. Conference call information will be provided inside the Connect room.
There's more information about these seminars on our forum, including the schedule for future sessions.
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.
In a world too full of very ordinary software products, its nice to find one occasionally that just does its job very well, with a feature set that has all the stuff you want and is not cluttered up with stuff you don’t, and perhaps most importantly, an interface that is intuitive and clean so that it can be used without any real learning curve.
Kim Cavanaugh and Lee Keller of Palm Breeze CAFE offer three nice video segments, on YouTube as well as TeacherTube. In their reviews, which are targeted at educators, they point out the value and potential of using Buzzword in educational settings - for students submitting assignments, or for teachers to check in on their students’ writing process
There was considerable buzz about Adobe’s online efforts today. First, the launch of Photoshop Express was announced, and picked up by many bloggers and analysts.
Reviews were quite positive, and with good reason. The functionality is excellent - like Buzzword, Photoshop Express makes common tasks easy, usable and is very responsive. And also like Buzzword, this is an elegant Rich Internet Application, with nice transitions and helpful animations. It just feels good to use it.
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’ve got some exciting news to share today. At Adobe’s annual MAX conference this morning, it will be announced that Adobe Systems has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Virtual Ubiquity. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year.
With special thanks to our intern, Roberto, we finally managed to capture CEO Rick Treitman doing a demo. The video is now posted to blip.tv (where you can see a higher resolution full screen version) and YouTube
