Not so sure if Adobe will push it through full featured online office suit, but surely the launch of Acrobat.com will make a lot of people worried. Adobe released today a free Web-based beta supplement called Acrobat.com for its popular PDF application. This Acrobat.com is a suite of hosted services available as public beta for free signup, bringing Adobe style RIA based communication, productivity, and collaboration tools right within a web browser.

This beta release supports basic Web conferencing (don’t forget there is desktop sharing) and limited free conversion of documents to PDF format. Acrobat.com works well with the beta version of Acrobat 9, which is schedule to ship on July, but as well have backward compatibility support. Though only Acrobat 9 users will have access to a "personal workspace in the clouds" that is available from virtually anywhere for working with others online.

Acrobat.com include Adobe Buzzword, a Web-based word processor was originally developed by Virtual Ubiquity, which Adobe acquired last September. Buzzword can be used to easily co-author and share documents for comment and review, creating high-quality print results and Adobe ConnectNow, a personal Web conferencing service that includes desktop sharing, video and voice conferencing and integrated chat. The sweetest of them all is availability of developer APIs for real-time collaboration, file sharing and conversion.

Buzzword’s access control feature is simply phenomenon. You can decide whether to share a document with anyone who knows its URL or to restrict access to specific Acrobat.com users. User rights–which the person who submits the document to Acrobat.com assigns–range from Co-author (full document-editing privileges) to Reviewer (may add comments only) to Reader (may read only). I love the import and export feature of Buzzword documents which allow other popular document formats including Word (.doc, .docx, .xml), .rtf, and .txt. You can also export to HTML or to PDF formats.

Those who already enjoyed the Adobe’s Acrobat Connect already know what to expect on Acrobat.com web conferencing. ConnectNow lets you share your computer desktop and collaborate on a document in real time. You may also take meeting notes in a notes pod, exchange text chat messages, or communicate via audio.

To use Acrobat.com you won’t be required to have any of Adobe’s desktop application installed. Acrobat.com will put lots of collaboration Software Company in deep troubling thought, since the document collaboration capabilities of Acrobat.com is far more superior than most of the well known collaborators. We will see some serious changes on document collaboration field next few months