New York — Expanding its ambition from being just a graphic software heavyweight into online services, Adobe Systems, last week quietly introduced the latest in its new free online service called Acrobat.com Presentations, hosted at Adobe Labs in public beta, the new technology marks the early steps towards competing with PowerPoint, the ubiquitous presentation-making software in Microsoft Office and Google.
Adobe now offers an online presentation service. (Credit: Adobe Systems)
Adobe’s Buzzword online word processor with its ConnectNow service is the most recent move in the graphic software makers’ efforts to ride the wave of interest in all things Software-as-a-Service and cloud-based screen sharing and other online meeting activities.
“The application includes built-in tools and layouts for adding visually appealing elements, such as pre-defined color sets, intelligent image placement and graphic tools for creating diagrams and adding effects,” Adobe said in a statement.
The service is developed using Adobe’s Flash technology that are truly splendid, and includes a decent set of features, but you will need “Flash 10” to make it work — and Presentations will be joining Adobe’s existing Buzzword online word processor and the online scale-down version of its Photoshop image-editing technology called Photoshop.com.
Although, Presentations is still in early testing mode, with many features still to come, the Presentations allows multiple people to work on the same presentation at the same time. “With simultaneous editing capabilities, no one is locked out of the presentation while others are making changes,” Adobe said. “The application also makes it easy to see who has access to the presentation, who is viewing, who is editing and which slide each person is editing.”
Nontheless, Presentations’ functionalities are fairly restricted at present but they should prove to be adequate for the majority of users. Users are able to export the documents as a PDF document and Adobe has integrated its own extensive creative experience in the venture.
Presentations, which is currently in testing phase and is available through Adobe’s Acrobat.com Labs, may also seem to be an attempt to strike a blow against Microsoft, which dominates the presentation software space with Office PowerPoint.
Other combining features promote Adobe’s competition with additional vendors, like Cisco’s WebEx and Citrix’s GoToMeeting: Presentations taps into Adobe’s ConnectNow Web conferencing software to enable groups of people to collaborate in the making of presentations.
“We are excited to see what our customers will do as they work together using Acrobat.com Presentations,” Erik Larson, director of marketing and product management for Adobe’s Business Productivity unit, said in a statement.
Microsoft has lately been entering in Adobe’s traditional boundaries by releasing Silverlight, a direct competitor to Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash, as well as the Expression Design 2 set which competes with the likes of Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Flash.
The software giant is also set to release an online version of Microsoft Office next year while Adobe has already confirmed that other features still to come include the ability to export and import to PowerPoint, or to add a chart or a graph. As for the entire Acrobat.com site, Larson says Adobe will be introducing a pay version later this year.
In comparison with other presentation software — Adobe did not name names — the company said that 98 percent of the world’s desktops have Adobe Flash technology. In contrast, a rival service, Google Docs, uses the JavaScript programming language built into Web browsers. Microsoft’s upcoming online Office service will use JavaScript but get extra abilities if a browser has Silverlight, Microsoft’s rival to Flash, installed.
Intel and Oracle have made their own pitches for cloud-based software, while IBM issues regular announcements. Open source projects such as Ubuntu are there too.
Larson stated that since Acrobat.com launched publicly a little less than a year ago, it has acquired 4 million registered users, with 100,000 more signing up each week.