Adobe Acrobat Now Offers Paid User Accounts

Today on June 14, Adobe is removing Acrobat.com from beta and converting it into a business with paid user accounts. The Web-based productivity services will offer paid subscriptions, giving business users a new way to collaborate on document creation. The 5 million currently registered users can still keep the free version, but there are a few limitations which can only be unlocked by upgrading to one of two premium plans.

The first option is Premium Basic, which enables users to convert 10 PDFs per month and to join online meetings with up to 5 people for a monthly fee of $14.99. Premium Plus, on the other hand, allows users to convert an unlimited number of PDFs and to join online conferences with up to ten people for $39 per month.

The present version of Adobe Acrobat provides numerous services including a Presentation application (similar to Microsoft’s PowerPoint), a Web meeting application called Adobe Connect Now, and a word processing application named Buzzword. In addition to these features, Adobe will introduce a spreadsheet service called Acrobat Tables, which can be previewed starting today.

In the long run, Adobe wants to give people a new way to work together and edit documents simultaneously with frequent updating. This will let users know who’s working on what parts of the document, and it will also give them the ability to speak with one another from within the application. Users will also have the option of switching to “private view,” which lets them make changes without pushing them live to the main document.

Ideally, the new features will help people cut down on the number of emails or meetings that are typically required when creating any sort of business document. Erik Larson, the director of product management and marketing for Acrobat.com, hopes to provide people with simple, easy-to-use tools for collaboration so that consumers can actually enjoy working together when using them.

The company also expects to give people access to these applications and files on mobile devices. Although this feature won’t be available until later in the year, it’ll allow users to edit existing documents and even create new ones.