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A new contender entered the online document sharing arena. Adobe after its online Photoshop edition has released an online office suite which is called Acrobat Office. It allows online sharing of document and can be used for both business and home purposes. It allows online publishing of documents and sharing of documents along with online conferencing facilities. The service is completely free and to use the service you just have to log on to www.acrobat.com.
Getting an account with Acrobat office.
First go to the acrobat office website. To sign up click on the sign up button.


You have to provide correct email address because a conformation email will be sent to your inbox for verification. You have to click on the link provided in the email to complete the sign up process.

Features of Acrobat Office.
Acrobat Office posses a flash based word processor called Buzzword. Buzzword has all the basic features you expect from an office application. It allows you to create documents, format documents, add images to your documents, hyperlinks, and tables. The interface is nice and easy to understand. You can easily share your documents or collaboratively create documents using Buzzword.

There are different sharing modes in Buzzword. Using these modes you can give different rights to users. You can set user rights for users while submitting a document. The first one is the Co-author mode which allows users to edit your document. The second one is the reviewer mode which allows users to just comment on these documents. The third one is reader mode which only allows users to read documents. Hence you can secure your online documents from unauthorized editing. The comments are given different colors depending on their privileges.
Buzzword supports a large number of file formats. You can import and export buzzword documents to .doc, .xml, .rtf, and .txt file formats. A buzzword file can be exported to .pdf, HTML format.
Acrobat office allows sharing of documents. When you create an account you get 5GB of storage space and each file you uploaded to the website will be given an URL. To share a document you have to provide the email address of those with which you desire to share the document. An email is sent to the email you specified which contains the URL of the document to be shared. You can easily sort documents based on user rights and also see the changes made to your document, time a document is edited, user comments etc.

Acrobat office allows conversion of documents to PDF documents. But it is restricted to 5 PDF conversions a month. So you cannot use the service just to convert your documents to PDF format. It supports a large number of file formats like .rtf, .txt, .doc, openoffice, word perfect, Photoshop, jpeg, tiff, png, gif, and bmp. The maximum size of a file that can be converted to PDF format is 200 MB.

Acrobat office online web conferencing feature called Connect Now. The maximum number of people who can participate in conferencing is three. It provides all you need for a full fledged online conferencing which include screen sharing, VOIP, chatting, white boards etc. Connect Now provides a unique meeting URL. So to participate in a conferencing just point your browser to that URL.
Prerequisites.
Acrobat office requires the latest flash player. You have to install Flash Player 10 . It supports Firefox 2, IE 6/7, and Safari 3 browsers and Widows Xp with SP2, Vista, or Mac OS v10.5.
It is going to be a close encounter with Acrobat Office and Google Docs. More and more features will be added to Acrobat office in the future including free and paid services.