What is it?
Acrobat.com offers a robust and inexpensive document sharing and online collaboration solution. Their free version allows you to create an online workspace and upload files of any type. These can then be organized into folders, tagged, shared, and office documents (including pdf, word, excel, powerpoint, jpgs, and others) can be viewed without downloading them or embedded into websites (I embedded a pdf and presentation below). The solution also has screen sharing and conference calling. The entire suite uses Flash so you probably already have the only plugin required.
Realtime online editing
The service has three other types of documents, the first is called "Buzzword Document" (a Microsoft Word replacement), "Tables" (an online version of excel), and "Presentation" (an online presentation builder like powerpoint). In these, multiple people can work on the same document the same time and they are very nice tools (better than the Google Docs versions in many ways, and Presentation is hands down the best online Powerpoint replacement I've seen - more comparable to the ipad version of keynote than powerpoint but fully featured - see sceenshot below). There are so many delightful and useful features in the Buzzword document editing that its tempting to say these are better than Microsoft Office but in document creation and editing, stability is key and I have not used it extensively enough to say. I really love the history timeline, the page numbers in the scrollbar, the alignment grids while moving objects, and the pixel size ruler while resizing. Fonts are limited (that might be a good thing for most people). Other cons for the document editing: you can not insert graphics into the header (logo for example) to build your own theme, so again, business use is limited if you are accustomed to delivering documents in a given template.
Document Management
The big winner here for me is the document management. It's fast, easy to use, and has build in viewing without downloading, sharing and embedding. Overall I thought the service was very polished, incredibly easy to use and fast. You can upload multiple documents with drag and drop, tag them, sort them, share them. In fact, I would love to see the the next version of Mac OS or Windows adopt the file management metaphor used here - in some ways they are easier to organize in Acrobat.com than they are when the files local on your hard drive, which is an amazing accomplishment that the Adobe team should be proud of. Amy Haynes (shout out to a former IBMer) was the lead experience designer and you can see her style in the work - I love that the sort-by-size icon is a t-shirt, and the sort-by-type-type icon is the club (deck of cards metaphor). (Amy, we've got a base22 t-shirt and coffee mug waiting for you if you get tired of Adobe
) The cons are that this appears to be offered only as a hosted service, which means you have to trust your files with Adobe. I don't doubt that this is safe (a breach of trust would be a PR nightmare for Adobe and the end of this experiment, but this will be a deal killer for lots of corporations since they will want to maintain control - understandable but disappointing. At Base22 we also keep like keeping our files on our own servers but hosting in the cloud is becoming more popular by the day.
Conferencing
The service also has conference calling and screen sharing. The conferencing is decent, not as good as GoToMeeting for screen-sharing, not as good as Skype for audio, but not bad either.
Embedded Docs
Below are some files embedded that I published from my workspace. While the workspace is secure, I can publish and share individual documents