Note: This is a repost of an article published in Australian Personal Computer (APC Mag) in May 2010

Adobe’s online service, Acrobat.com, is free, has great apps and lets you share files.

Sharing electronic documents can be a real challenge and we often find ourselves dealing with bounced emails, FTP accounts and other issues. Adobe’s free Acrobat.com cloud based service was designed to make it easy to share information quickly and easily and is a combination of many useful features, including a word processor [that I'm writing this article with), a presentation and tables tool, web conferencing and more.

UPLOADING

For this article we'll be focusing on sharing files. First you need a free Acrobat.com account. Browse to http://acrobat.com and click the Sign Up button. Enter your email address, create a password and other details, then click Sign Up and you are ready to go.

Once logged in, you will see a list of your files. These are stored online and can be accessed by anyone that you give permission to [and anywhere). Let's start by uploading a file of your own. In the 'Actions' palette on the left-hand side, click on 'Upload' and then browse and select the file you wish to upload.

Click on the file name, and if you uploaded a PDF then Acrobat.com will l show you a preview. You can zoom in and out and navigate through the pages. To download the file again, click 'Download' to copy the file back to your computer. No matter where you go now, you can store and access up to 5GB of files on any computer by browsing to Acrobat.com and logging in.

MOBILE

Another way to upload and share documents is via a mobile device, and at time of writing there was support for both iPhone and BlackBerry, with more mobile platforms planned. [Web update: Android supported now too] You can scan documents with the built-in camera and have them automatically converted to PDF and uploaded, browse your files, preview them and even share them with other users while out and about.

SHARING

Adobe has created additional ways to quickly share documents, including an Adobe AIR-based desktop application which lets you drag and drop files to be uploaded, a Microsoft Outlook plug-in, and even Adobe Reader 9 has a button in the tool bar to allow you to share documents quickly. You can access these additional plug-ins here: http://acrobat.com/downloads.html.

To share a file that is already uploaded, open the preview once again and click the ‘Share’ button at the bottom left of the preview. Acrobat.com will present you with a list of options on how to share the document. To share with individuals, type in their email address and Acrobat.com will send them an email with a link to your document. Other options allow you to control what they can do with the file or allow you to open up access to anyone. When finished, Acrobat.com will show you who you are sharing the document with, if they’ve opened it, and at any time you can add additional users by simply clicking the Share button once more.

ORGANISING

After using Acrobat.com for a while, you will start to build up a large collection of files . Use the icons at the top of the file list to sort your files by different properties, or use the Lists and Collections feature on the bottom left of the screen. [Web update: This feature has been replaced with Tags & Workspaces]

Download PDF of original article as in APC Mag May 2010

Adobe have upgraded Acrobat.com over the weekend to the new “Unity” release, bringing the same collaboration benefits currently offered for documents & meeting rooms to your slides & spreadsheets.

I’ve been using Buzzword, Adobe’s online word processor, ever since Adobe acquired Virtual Ubiquity and the fact that I can now have Presentations & Tables, all in a unified organizer is fantastic. Do I still use Microsoft Word, Powerpoint & Excel? Sure I do, but the collaborative nature of Acrobat.com is seeing me change the way I work and I’m progressively sharing more of my work while its still in progress, rather than waiting till i’m finished, and having other people add their input as I’m writing is fantastic and has sped up the way I work.

The biggest benefit is that there are no more annoying file sharing issues, concerns around which is the latest version, or worrying about what software everyone involved has. If you have Flash 9 or above  (99.3% of Australians do!) then you are good to go.

Check out “Why our team can beat your team” post on the Acrobat.com blog for a good look at how this will improve your business, then check out this list of improvements

Oh, and did I mention its COMPLETELY FREE!!!

This morning I gave a keynote presentation at the Future of the Book conference in Auckland, NZ. My intent was to talk about what Adobe is doing in three areas related to Book Publishing: Meeting Customer Expectations,Speeding up workflows & monetizing your ideas and effort.

My talk included an update on PDF, a look at EPUB and the support in the Adobe toolset, and how Flash & AIR are allowing us to create really engaging experiences.

Here are my slides (demo links are below)

Apart from showing how you can use InDesign CS4 to quickly create eBooks and Flash files, here are links to items mentioned during the talk;

Buzzword (part of Acrobat.com) – A free online word processor that allows multiple people to collaborate on the same document. It supports EPUB output.

Digital Editions – A free EPUB / PDF reader from Adobe.

EBooks.com – An Australian eBook site using Adobe Content Server to protect eBooks.

Adobe’s Digital Publishing Technology site – A series of articles and tools

New York Times Reader – An Adobe AIR based news reader

Sams Interactive Reader – A great application for kids (try it.. I guarantee you’ll smile)