Adobe Offers Collaborative Text Editor and Web Conferencing Tools for Free

Big news: Adobe is giving something away! Might be just while in beta, they don;t really state the latter on their website. But they do say it is FREE.

The first free Adobe product I just discovered is Acrobat Buzzword, an online collaborative text editor or word processor (think Google Docs). While way ahead of the competition in the visual aspect of it with a stunning look and feel (Adobe standards) very intuitive and attractive interface that uses many “transition” effects from screen to screen. It is way behind other products of the kind in the functionality aspect. Some basic options are still missing on Adobe Acrobat Buzzword like being able to organize documents into different folders. Also, the formatting menu doesn’t offer many paragraph edit options and the fonts to choose from aren’t many. While intuitive, like I mentioned before, the user interface doesn’t follow the standards Google Docs and Zoho Office have tried to follow: creating an interface that is as similar to desktop office suites as possible to take advantage of users’ experience in the latter.

Another tool that is available for free right now is Adobe ConnectNow a fully functioning online Web meeting or Web conferencing tool that requires no plugin install and works very smoothly (again, Adobe Standards). Very aesthetically pleasing interface. ConnectNow works seamlessly with Buzzword so you can launch meetings from within a Buzzword document and collaborate on it with meeting participants. For this product Adobe added features present separately in many other web conferencing services into one product:

• Unique meeting room URL
• Screen sharing
• Video conferencing
• Chat pod
• Whiteboard
• Several integrated audio choices
• Remote control (great for technical support, for instance).

These products are excellent opportunities for collaborative authoring, especially for online classes and telecommuters. Again these are products with Adobe’s standards but are free of charge.

A.Viary Invites

So, I have been testing a.viary features. Aviary is a collection of online imaging software. Their suite is supposed to be feature-rich. The developers keep a very creative and thought-provoking blog. You can tell they are really trying to approach online production tools from a different perspective.

So far they have Phoenix (image editor, like an online “Photoshop”) and Peacock (a pattern creator) running. But they plan on implementing many other tools soon.

I have 4 invites for Aviary and would like to give them to people in the learning field so they can have a chance to try these tools while they are still in private beta.

Please leave a comment here telling me what connection you have with learning or eLearning (instructor, student) and come back to let us know what you think about the tools once you’ve used them. I think it would be really interesting to know what people in the education field think of this type of tools.

A hint, leave you email address in the comment in this format (to avoid spam): username [at] domain.com.