Acrobat.com Out of Beta; Free and Paid Web Conferencing

Steve Werner

A few weeks ago, before I left on vacation, I posted about a free web conferencing feature available in InDesign CS4. In the comments to that posting, Anne-Marie noted that these same features are part of Acrobat.com, which you can actually join without having CS4. InDesign CS4 and the other CS4 applications just gives you quick access within the application. Until now, these services have been listed as being “in beta.”

Last week, Adobe announced that the Acrobat.com suite of services are now “out of public beta.” This means two things: You can continue to use the Share My Screen feature as it was described in my previous post. This is limited to you and two guests. What’s new is that if you want to expand the capabilities to more clients or colleagues you can purchase an upgrade to one of two Premium subscription services. You can get the invitation to upgrade when you log into Share My Screen as I described in the previous posting (File > Share My Screen). You’ll a link to learn more.

If you click the link you can learn about the upgrade options:

There are two choices:

• The strangely named Premium Basic service includes Adobe ConnectNow Web meeting capacity for up to five participants and online conversion of 10 uploaded documents to PDF per month (the latter obviously isn’t targeted to InDesign users!). This costs $14.99/month or $149/year.
• The Premium Plus service includes ConnectNow web meeting capacity for up to 20 participants and unlimited online creation of PDF files. This costs $39/month or $390/year.

Until July 16, 2009, Adobe is offering $15 off the Premium Basic annual plan, or $50 off the Premium Plus annual plan.