The newly revamped site promises to allow you to collaborate with your colleagues and work online on spreadsheets and presentations
The newly revamped site promises to allow you to collaborate with your colleagues and work online on spreadsheets and presentations
Though the IT industry is one that changes at a blazing pace, there are many times when you get a 'oh, no, not again!' sort of feeling. And seeing what acrobat.com offers is one of those things that are guaranteed to make you say this, especially if you have been following the Web from its infancy.
Why? This is because acrobat.com allows you to collaborate with people by having spreadsheets and presentations online. And the reason why we old time writers will say 'not again' is because this is bound to remind us of the days of Oracle's Network Computer (NC), which was supposed to make you do everything online.
Any difference?
But sometimes, a technology that comes today and is thrown out because it doesn't fit the bill may come back again a decade later and seem like it is worth it simply because the habits of people have changed in the interim period. And this is one reason why acrobat.com may work.
When the idea of the NC was launched, people did everything off their hard disk and used the Web for some tasks. While people still use the hard disk on their computers a lot (case in pointu2014though I am getting details on acrobat.com from this site and others, this article is being stored in ('C:\Documents and Settings\balaji.narasimhan\Desktop\balaji\official\unpublished') the amount of collaboration that they have to do is increasing.
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Another big plus for acrobat.com, which is offering online presentations, is that the way presentations are being made is changing. Once upon a time, you walked into the office of a client with your laptop in hand, plugged it into the projector, and then started your sales pitch. Today, you may make a presentation on a video conferencing link to a client some 2,000 kilometres away, and the only way you can do that is with the Web.
Another important thing is that collaboration between teams separated by large distances is increasing. Once upon a time, an international sales director for SAARC, with officers reporting to him from places like Maldives, Dhaka, Colombo, Mumbai and others, may have been forced to get separate e-mails from all his direct reports and then add figures into his spreadsheet. Today, he may want to allow these people to enter the figures directly into an online spreadsheet. Currently, this is not possible with acrobat.com because this service is available for subscription only in North America and also because spreadsheets are still in beta, but in the future, this is bound to change.
Embrace and extend
Will such changes in mindset help acrobat.com and other similar service providers to get people to move beyond the PC? It is hard to give a resounding 'yes' to such a question when one considers that something like this failed many years ago.
But, just as there will always be people who will buy a PC because they hate the cramped keyboards of laptops, there will always be demand for PC-based heavyweight applications and nimble Web-based ones. As they say, it takes all kinds to make the world!
QUICK TAKE
>>Acrobat is offering many collaborative tools
>>Using this, you can get more done online
>>But can this challenge the desktop PC's primary role?
What acrobat.com offers
>>Buzzword (word processor)
>>ConnectNow (for live Web-based meetings)
>>Presentation
>>Spreadsheet
NOTE: Presentation and spreadsheet are still in beta and can be accessed from labs.acrobat.com
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