Acrobat.com Presentations Tool Now on Adobe Labs

Adobe today released a beta version of Presentations, their latest addition to the suite of collaborative tools hosted on Acrobat.com. While I'm not sure when Adobe will really start to promote Acrobat.com as a real collaboration solution for the mobile worker (it's there, available now, and there have been some half-hearted links to it from within Adobe's site), seeing Presentations added to the suite of tools available in Acrobat.com is an important addition.

If Adobe is really building a Flex-based alternative to Microsoft Office, focusing more on collaboration than Office itself, then Presentations is a natural and needed fit. The next logical application would be some sort of Excel clone, as users of "office"-style suites would require a spreadsheet application. Google already offers this via Google Docs.

As they did with Buzzword, their online word processor, you'll find what distinguishes Presentations on Acrobat.com from presentations in Google Docs is the rich suite of formatting and styling controls. The level of styling and design control is clearly enabled via the rich media capabilities of Flex, and something that's currently way out of the reach of Google Docs and its reliance on JavaScript and CSS.

I'm not sure that Presentations (in its current, beta form) stacks up as well against SlideRocket, which has been around a lot longer and has equal if not superior design controls. SlideRocket also offers PPT import and export, Google Docs integration, an offline player, and greater sharing and content re-use between a group of users. Again, SlideRocket has been around a lot longer, so it's able to offer these features while Adobe's product is a first beta. (In all honesty, I expected Adobe to simply buy SlideRocket as they did Buzzword, which would have given them a more capable and mature product from the get-go.)

Still, as Adobe begins to provide a suite of office-style products for online collaboration, people who are already using Buzzword for creating Word documents will find Presentations a natural and easy fit. The product has a long way to go to catch up to SlideRocket, but I can easily see how students where I work will take to building group PowerPoint presentations collaboratively using Presentations just as they do for their group Word documents in Buzzword. Of course to turn in those presentations to faculty, Presentations will need to export to PPT and not just PDF. =D