Acrobat.com

Over the past year, FedEx earned about half a billion dollars on transfering paper documents. It proves that the electronic signature market will continue to grow rapidly. Adobe (aka the giant of the electronic documents space) also understands this. Last week Adobe acquired the most successful electronic signature service - EchoSign. Adobe intends to close its own service eSignatures (which was still in beta) and integrate EchoSign into its SaaS suite Acrobat.com. However, if you look at what Acrobat.com has recently become, this news is likely to be less of a cause for celebration than commiseration with EchoSign’s users and fans.

Now it's time for another portion of criticism towards the Acrobat.com online office. The last time we reviewed the service, they introduced many useful features, but now they are doing strange things again. Although the press release looks nice: Acrobat.com added online collaboration work-spaces. In fact, they added only shared folders were you can invite your co-workers / clients for file collaboration. Previously, it was possible to share only separate files. So there is more PR than improvements made during several months. Besides Adobe decided that online shared folders - it is so demanded tool on the market that they can make money on it. Although the cost of service was not risen, but the free version allows to create only one workspace (shared folder), and the Premium Basic plan (which costs $15/month) - is limited to 20 shared folders. In addition (very odd) you can't access shared folders on your mobile device (Blackberry and iPhone).

Online office suite Acrobat.com is still like a dress at the fashion show - beautiful, expensive, and you can wear it only on the podium. But in Adobe continues to work hard, update the service and step by step it becomes more ready for business. The other day Acrobat.com added 35 new features. And the first feature we were pleased to see is the idea voting system Acrobat.com Ideas. The main new feature inside the service is the new structure based on file manager. Now, all files are stored in one place and the main menu of service contains only 2 tabs: Files (for file management) and Meetings (for web-conferencing).