Adobe Delivers Preview of Online Presentations Service

Adobe has announced the preview release of Acrobat.com Presentations, a new online service that enables users to easily create and collaborate on presentations.

Adobe officials said Adobe.com Presentations builds on the Acrobat.com set of hosted services, including Adobe Buzzword and Adobe ConnectNow, by making it easy for virtually anyone to create professional-looking presentations online. The application includes built-in tools and layouts for adding visually appealing elements, such as pre-defined color sets, intelligent image placement and graphic tools for creating diagrams and adding effects, Adobe said.

Users can enhance their presentations with visual special effects, slide transitions and embedded videos that can be accessed by anyone with Adobe Flash Player, which is installed on 98 percent of Internet-connected desktops worldwide, the company said.

The new presentations service is available for free as a public beta release on Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/presentations/. Acrobat.com Presentations extends the Acrobat.com vision of enabling a better way for people to work together on the Web by providing a rich, engaging presentation application built on the Adobe Flash Platform.

"By adding Acrobat.com Presentations to our existing set of hosted services, our customers will be able to extend the experience of creating and collaborating on documents into the visual world of presentations," said Erik Larson, director of marketing and product management, Adobe’s Business Productivity Business Unit, in a statement. "Buzzword has helped people – from office workers and creative professionals to educators and students – express and share their ideas, and we are excited to see what our customers will do as they work together using Acrobat.com Presentations."

Acrobat.com Presentations enables users to work together on a presentation, all contributing at the same time or separately, regardless of where they are located, Adobe said. The technology includes features such as simultaneous editing capabilities so that no user is locked out of the presentation while others are making changes. The application also makes it easy to see who has access to the presentation, who is viewing, who is editing and which slide each person is editing, Adobe officials said.

Also, because the presentation lives online, people can access the latest version from any Internet-connected computer and deliver the presentation from anywhere online via ConnectNow or offline by exporting to PDF, Adobe said.