Adobe has announced the beta launch of Acrobat.com, a suite of online services hosted by Adobe that allows you to create documents together and share them. It’s a software as a service (SaaS) solution intended to increase productivity and collaboration. The idea is that people can create documents faster without email attachments or version control issues.

They are starting with three apps:
1. Adobe Buzzword for creating and reviewing documents together.
2. Adobe ConnectNow for holding full-fledged online web conferences with up to three people.
3. The Acrobat.com organizer for sharing 5GB of files with others online, including the ability to convert 5 documents to PDF and embed your documents in blogs, wikis or other web pages.

The document collaboration services are currently free but the intent is to provide businesses with premium subscription services such as workgroup capabilities, administrative controls, more advanced document workflows and additional capacity.

You can access Acrobat.com while online from almost any browser using the Flash Player or from your desktop via Acrobat.com on AIR. They are also planning to roll out a version where you can access your work via the AIR version of Acrobat.com while off-line.

Acrobat.com is really a new solution to an old problem. Adobe’s products are desktop based including the dreaded Acrobat PDF documents. Moving to web based solutions is a step in the right direction and answering the call for ubiquitous access via cloud computing. PDFs are still inherently desktop based documents which Acrobat.com provides an online mechanism to manage. The chat and meeting features has some similarities to Webex and Live Meeting capabilities. It’s also akin to web office suites like Google Docs and Zoho but not quite since these offer a full suite of more office solutions like spreadsheets, presentations, etc.