Adobe Systems Inc. is planning to update its Acrobat software and offer free hosted services for document creation, sharing and storage. The next version of Acrobat will support the company’s Flash multimedia technology, and the Web site, Acroboat.com, offers beta version of several hosted document services.
The move positions Adobe competitively against Microsoft, Google and other companies offering similar services online and signals Adobe’s first major move into the hosted-services arena for business documents.
Hosted services will include Adobe Buzzword, a word-processing service that the company acquired from Virtual Ubiquity in September.
Adobe also is offering Adobe ConnectNow, a service that offers free Web conferencing for up to three people, and an online repository for documents. The company also provides guidance for converting documents to PDFs and will let users convert up to five documents into PDF for free on the site. Adobe says Acrobat.com is a place where users can work with documents in the cloud, a definition that is similar to how Microsoft and Google are positioning online services they offer for free.
Even as Adobe rolls out hosted document services, Adobe Acrobat 9, the company’s packaged software for document sharing, is expected to ship in late June or early July, said Kevin M. Lynch, vice president of product management and marketing for Acrobat. The software will allow users to incorporate Flash content in documents that can be converted to PDF, so any dynamic media created in Flash and included in the document will become portable, he said.