In my post “Adobe Realizes it Gaffed”, I talked about some of the ways in which Adobe missed opportunities to capitalize with web based ventures. Well it looks like that argument was correct and the Adobe team is actively trying to catch up. On the heels of the announcement of Photoshop Express, Adobe just launched a web-based office suite of collaborative software at Acrobat.com.

If you think this is just direct competition for Google Docs and 37Signals you’re wrong. Acrobat trumps them both in spades!

The Highlights at a Glance:

• Flash-based
• Uses Adobe ConnectNow
• Uses your pre-existing Adobe ID to log-in
• Allows for online storage
• Sharing of Files
• Works with the downloadable version of Acrobat 9
• Edit and Creates PDFs online
• Each user is given a space called a Meeting Room
• Allows for Screen Sharing via Web
• Can access your web cam from the browser!
• Can share your microphone from browser
• Appears to allow VOIP conference calls
• Advanced Bandwidth Allocation Preferences
• Shows all connected users
• Shared Whiteboard for taking notes and quick sketches
• Native chatting

PICS
Click pics to see more.

I tested it briefly for this article and a few things I can tell you is that it’s fast and dead simple to use. While the fact that it’s Flash-based worries me, it makes perfect sense. They invented Flash and I’m sure are dedicated to proving it’s scalability and usefulness for building web applications. It would be admitting a weakness if they used Ruby for something like this, not to mention with the recent problems Twitter’s been having that doesn’t sound like the best idea these days anyways.

The verdict? Acrobat.com aims to be the new place people do business online. It’s Skype, 37Singals’ Campfire and Google Docs all rolled into one! After Beta testing this once, I’ll never use at least two of those applications ever again! ReadWriteWeb has an even more in-depth review.

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