Those with a long memory may well remember Adobe’s first attempt to conquer the business market with the launch of Acrobat Exchange and its promise of the “paperless office” built around the round-robin swapping of PDFs. The arrival of the internet largely put paid to that original all-encompassing vision but now, sixteen years later, Adobe is back for a second bite at the cherry with the announcement of the official out-of-beta launch of Acrobat.com.

So is Adobe likely to be any more successful this time around? The recent press briefing, given by product manager Eric Larsen and hosted within Acrobat.com itself, was certainly interesting…

As I’ve written previously,  I was seriously impressed by the Acrobat.com beta service which offered central document storage, a powerful online word processor, PDF conversion and even small-scale web conferencing. If nothing else, it was worth joining just to post large PDFs centrally rather than sending them as email attachments that might not get through.

Now the service is going to be expanded with an online presentations package and an online spreadsheet meaning that you have the same core office apps as provided by Google Docs, but with a lot more power and a far superior user interface and experience.

Even more important strategically are Adobe’s announcements regarding the immediate availability of new APIs designed to let developers integrate Acrobat.com into their own custom apps and especially the imminent launch of a mobile service aimed at smartphones such as the iPhone.

Despite these announcements, my initial response to the briefing was sceptical based on three major areas of concern:

The first of these – the question of security and uptime – is generic and applies to any cloud-based service. Erik tried to play down these issues but I wasn’t convinced by his argument that cloud-based services are inherently more secure than “notebooks walking out of the door” and statistically less likely to crash or be unavailable than desktop apps (the point is that these are local risks that we’re responsible for).

Other doubts were specific to Acrobat.com. In particular the new suite still lacks the most important productivity app of all, and the one that best demonstrates the advantages of a univerally-accessible centralized cloud-based approach: an email inbox. When this point was raised early on, Erik tried to play down the importance of email promising that he would show how Acrobat.com could “do it better” but that sounded hollow.

The biggest concern of all is a potential show-stopper. Acrobat.com is currently gaining over 100,000 new users every week but that’s because it is free. I’d assumed that that’s how the service would continue, but the focus of the briefing was on the fact that Acrobat.com is now to be a subscription service starting at $15 a month for US users. Worse, based on Adobe’s grossly unfair UK pricing, that probably means close on £15 a month when European availability is delivered in due course. You’d need to add a lot more than an online spreadsheet to justify that.

During the briefing however, each of these doubts was largely addressed and largely allayed.

Regarding security and uptime, every organization will make its own decisions but as Erik put it, the move to cloud-based computing is a “mega trend” ie the advantages are such that it will happen, the only question is how. Moreover Adobe could have a major strength on this front.  When I asked about AIR-based access to Acrobat.com, Erik revealed that, while this will only be online to begin with (ie outside the browser), Adobe is working hard on a system to enable offline storage and access to documents – essential both for local backup and to avoid downtime. Providing these offline capabilities is not easy because Acrobat.com is designed to enable multiple users to work on the same central document, but it is in the pipeline.

Regarding the email issue, Erik pointed out that you can email colleagues from within the app but that this is largely unnecessary. Indeed the whole point of Acrobat.com is to get away from the inefficiencies of the email round-robin. Instead Erik showed how his team had worked together to produce the launch paper and presentation, with everyone always working on the latest, up-to-date, centrally-hosted version. Particularly impressive was the ability to drag back on a timeline and see how the document had changed over time and Erik talked about how Adobe is working on a system whereby those few emails associated with a project are automatically attached as metadata within this timeline.

By this stage it was clear that Acrobat.com should not be seen as an essentially standalone online suite but rather as a collaborative tool – more Google Wave than Google Docs.

Such collaboration is the key to Acrobat.com and, crucially, it turns out that it’s only if you’re taking advantage of its workgroup capabilities that you are expected to pay (Adobe’s message on this front is hopelessly garbled and gives the impression that the main benefit you are paying for is PDF conversion!).

In other words the service will still be available for free to individual users including basic collaboration and web conferencing to give a taster of what’s possible. Even better – and a real lesson learned from PDF-based workflows – you aren’t expected to pay if you’re invited to collaborate on a project. It’s only the initiator that needs to be a subscriber.

In this new light I have to say that the new Acrobat.com looks a lot more attractive. I’m not sure that it’s got what it takes to seize the average office especially as Microsoft and Google are clearly working on their own similar solutions. However, Acrobat.com will certainly attract Adobe’s existing design-focused userbase especially as we can expect tighter integration with the CS apps in future.

Moreover by raising the design bar, Acrobat.com will be a hard act for anyone to follow. Crucially, unlike Google Docs, Acrobat.com feels like a polished desktop app so you quickly forget that you are working online.

Most importantly, by shifting away from today’s  workgroup collaboration built on the email exchange of multiple fixed standalone PDFs towards a single live document shared online, Acrobat.com does indeed make a credible pitch at “doing it better.”

Ultimately Acrobat.com’s biggest strength as a cloud-based platform for the future comes from Adobe’s past experience with Acrobat on the desktop – it has learned how not to do it.