Adobe Acrobat 8 has been out for almost a year, yet you seldom hear about some of the built-in collaboration features that went into version 8. This version attempts to integrate the Breeze and Flash, two technologies Adobe acquired from MacroMedia.
Adobe took the path of integrating collaboration directly into the document. One new feature in particular is interesting: basic team collaboration. It allows groups simple sharing of reviews, markups, discussions and notes. The capability is really quite ingenious in its simplicity: it enables collaboration by taking advantage of the network, yet without requiring a dedicated server process.
PDF documents get mapped to a network location that can be accessed by all users. When users make comments or markups on a PDF document, those comments are stored into the shared area. When a document is viewed, it automatically sucks in all associated data from the shared folder and merges it with the original document.
As soon as a team member makes a comment, the update will immediately show up for any other user already viewing that same document on the network. Users will get updates as long as they can see the shared area — users don’t need to be able to see each other directly on the network.
The shared area where the collaboration information is stored can be a shared drive, a SharePoint server, or any other network location. Adobe offers a hosted option for $39/month to host shared information for up to 15 users.
