14 DAY TRIAL // The new Acrobat.com is now live. Having been revealed last week, Adobe's office and online collaboration suite gets a major refresh with a couple of products leaving the beta tag behind and also a significantly improved file management system, courtesy of a completely new back-end. For the users it means that things should go smoother and finding and organizing their files should be a lot easier.
“Acrobat.com, up until now, has been a collection of different applications running on different architectures, and file organizers. So, we retooled and created a new back-end that is the collaboration engine that will power everything we do going forward. It's been a tremendous amount of work, but it's work that we believe will pay off well for the future of Adobe's online applications,” Adobe wrote.
The biggest new feature, from the users' perspective, is the new unified file organizer. Previously, file management was left to the individual products available on Acrobat.com each with their own methods of uploading and handling the files. This wasn't exactly ideal and the problem was made worse by the increasing number of files users had to manage.
So, Adobe got to work and came up with a brand new file management system on the back-end which translates to a single file organizer for the users. All the documents, spreadsheets and presentations are now available in the same place. However, Adobe went one step further and also came up with a new way of organizing and managing the increasing number of files using so-called “collections” which work more like playlists allowing users to place a file in multiple collections. Finally, Adobe also introduced a new search feature which it says will have the possibility to search inside the documents at a later date.
While part of the team was working on the back-end, the products themselves were also being polished. Adobe is now confident that both Presentations and Tables are mature enough, so the products are leaving Acrobat.com Labs and are now a part of the proper service. The move also comes with a number of new features in both Presentations and in Tables. But these features are just the beginning. “Now that we've built this new foundation, you will be seeing a series of new services and functions throughout the coming year, all aimed at helping you collaborate with others whether they're in your immediate team, or across the firewall in another organization,” the company added.