Acrobat.com Beta

Mark on the acrobat.com team left a comment on my previous post about a snag they had this morning. It seems service was available soon after I tried but I had to go on to other things. I have had a chance to play around a little tonight though.

I still like the Buzzword interface as I reported on before, but the conglomeration of pieces in acrobat.com seems a bit fractured. I am in the Share area where I can upload files and share but this is apparently different than my Buzzword documents that I can also share.

I’m also running into trouble with Share. The interface seemed to freeze up, at least I couldn’t perform more of the upper-level commands like upload and share. I reloaded the interface which set all right again and uploaded my file.

acrobat.com successful upload graphicAn indicator shows in the lower-right to indicate the upload is in process and a bright graphic message displays in the same corner to indicate completion.

My document showed up in my list (again, my Share list, not my Buzzword list — I don’t like too many lists). I chose to open the file and am now waiting (since I started writing this post) for the “Creating Flash Preview…” message to be replaced by my document. Oh, another Word document worked fine. I guess you need to be careful about the contents of your Word docs. The first one I uploaded turned out to be one my daughter created making use of colorful WordArt — yes, oxymoron comes to mind.

The document that opened even showed deletions and revisions from the tracked changes in Word. It lost some of the notations but red deletions and green revisions with strike-throughs were nice to see come across. Share does seem strictly for sharing files with others. Thinking I might want to edit this file I clicked the New Buzzword Document icon in the upper-right hoping it would convert this file into an editable file but this button simply opened a new empty Buzzword file and left me wondering how to get back to my shared files. Oh, the stacked little pages icon that pulls out and tells me to “click here” to access my other acrobat.com files. Still wondering why I have to go multiple places to access my acrobat.com files.

With Share you can embed an object in a web page to permit viewing of your files. Here is the upload complete graphic shared directly from acrobat.com beta.

I also shared the document above with another person — well just another me. The email invitation came through with a thumbnail of my document and instructions for my invitee.

acrobat.com share email sample

Since I have the file set for public access my invitee was taken directly to the file where they could read the document, download the file and copy a URL or embed code to share with others. I was hoping they could leave me a message directly in the interface without logging in but I guess they can email be back. They also see an option to view My Files. I wonder if this takes them to my other publicly accessible files or to their personal list of acrobat.com share files. It takes them to their own list which does not exist and they must login or create an account to start. The New Buzzword document and Meet links also take them to a sign up screen.

Need to stop now, the short and succinct response is that features seem disjointed. Perhaps there are reasons for this that I don’t yet comprehend but acrobat.com and Buzzword seem joined together at the hip rather than being one single interface to collaborate and share files — whether they are in-work or just being published for viewing.