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Offline Online Office
June 2, 2008

In an aliterative masterpiece, Adobe Acrobat now has an offline online office suite that uses Adobe Air to deliver the application to either a webpage or your desktop. The suite, dressed out in white on black, looks rather spectacular; actual performance may vary. If Adobe can address some of the speed issues as the software works its way through beta testing, the platform has a great deal of potential.

The suite features a selection of tools including the Buzzword word processor, ConnectNow for online collaboration, the ability to publish as a PDF, and the ability to store and share files online. With a generous 5GB of storage space, Acrobat.com looks to pull everything together to be your one place for online work centered around documents. Even though there may be other tools out there that accomplish the same tasks, having everything together is certainly a benefit. Not wishing to totally replace online disk storage sites (or the gratuitous use of said sites to serve large media files) Acrobat.com does limit their file storage to mainly document formats. Adobe's new site is also very nice in that it uses Adobe's Air to provide a desktop download that looks and works the same as the online site. This lets a user focus on the task at hand without additional distractions that may come from the regular browser.

So how does this compare with other online suites like Zoho? Acrobat.com and Buzzword may look nicer, but I find that it just feels a bit slower in use. I do like the menus in Buzzword as they look very familiar to Windows users, but the toolbars and some other icons can be a bit artsy. Zoho also offers PDF publication and document sharing, but ConnectNow takes it a bit further with screen sharing and video conferencing. In the end, my recommendation for a word processor remains with Zoho Writer for ease of use and speed. However, if you are looking for a full suite around which to base your online authoring Acrobat.com may be just the ticket!

Posted by Chris Harris on June 2, 2008 | Comments (0)