14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has launched a brand-new tool for its online collaboration and office suite Acrobat.com dubbed Workspaces. With Acrobat.com Workspaces, a group of users can share multiple files and documents with each other in one place, making it easier to manage different projects and teams. The new tool is now live for everyone using Acrobat.com, including the free offering, but there are limitations to the number of workspaces that users can create depending on the version they are using.
"Workspaces are for helping groups of people share groups of documents. Now, by creating a Workspace, you and your extended team can share and collaborate on a set of project files rather than sharing them one-by-one. And there are no limits to how you define your team. Teams often span organization, firewalls, and geographies," Rick Treitman, director of product management for Acrobat.com, wrote.
"So if you're working with a couple of freelancers from outside your formal team, go ahead and invite them in. (You can always remove them at the end of the project.)," he added.
It's impossible to miss the new Shared Workspaces section on Acrobat.com. Creating a new shared workspace is easy enough, just click on the large "New Workspace" button. After that, you can add contributors to it by sending out invitations via email. You can create new folders inside the workspace and you can move files from other workspaces or your Personal Workspace or upload them from your computer.
The Workspaces tool is available for all Acrobat.com users, but those employing the free version only get to create one workspace. They can join any number of other workspaces if they are invited, though. Moving up through the tiers, users of the Acrobat.com Premium Basic level can create up to 20 workspaces while Premium Plus users have an unlimited number of workspaces.
Acrobat.com got a major update last autumn with a complete overhaul of the interface. Adobe says there are ten million registered users for Acrobat.com, though how many of those are actively using the service is unknown. The online collaboration suite market is getting pretty crowded these days with major players like Google and its Google Docs suite, but also smaller ones like Zoho vying for position.