Adobe.com Moves Out of Beta, Adds Premium Subscription Services

Adobe has just announced that Adobe.com, the cloud-based office suite, has moved out of the public beta phase and will see the addition of two new, payed, premium services aimed at the enterprise market. Adobe.com was launched in June 2008 and has since gained five million users with 100,000 more signing up each week.

“Acrobat.com is poised to become the online destination for team collaboration, with the tools business people need to get work done faster, together, from anywhere. Our customers have moved from e-mailing multiple versions of documents back and forth to collaborating on documents directly in a fluid online environment,” Rob Tarkoff, senior vice president, Adobe’s Business Productivity Business Unit, said. “Over the next 12 months, we will continue to add powerful yet simple-to-use team collaboration capabilities that establish a new way to work, while removing barriers to getting work done within and across companies and around the world.”

Acrobat.com launched with a word processor, Adobe Buzzword, an online software for converting up to five files to Adobe PDF and some collaboration and sharing tools. Adobe ConnectNow allows users to share their desktop with anyone, Adobe Share is a tool for sharing files via URL and My Files a cloud-based file-storing service.

Just recently, Adobe added a presentation software to Acrobat.com, called Presentations, and now it is announcing Acrobat.com Tables, a spreadsheet program. Tables is currently in beta and will be available for free on Acrobat.com Labs.

To coincide with the move out of beta, Adobe has introduced two new subscription services. The basic offering with Adobe Buzzword, ConnectNow Web with up to three participants, Create PDF with a five-file limit and up to 5 GB of storage on MyFiles will remain free.

The first payed service, Premium Basic, will be available for $14.99 a month, or $149 a year, and will enable up to five users in ConnectNow Web and the ability to create ten files to PDF. The second service, Premium Plus, enables up to ten participants in ConnectNow Web and unlimited creation of PDF files, and will cost $39 a month, or $390 a year. The premium services will initially be available only in the US.

“Improved collaboration is a critical need for today’s companies that must move faster and do more with less. At the same time, business people expect to use online technology at work just like they do outside the workplace – especially the generation now entering the workforce,” Melissa Webster, program vice president, Content and Digital Media Technologies, IDC, shared. “Successful online collaboration tools will show the potential of cloud-based services to revolutionize the way business people get work done by helping teams stay connected and work together much more efficiently in real-time.”