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Posts Tagged ‘Integrations’

Adobe’s Upgrades Acrobat.com, Launches New Mobile App

Adobe’s online office suite, Acrobat.com, is getting its first major upgrade since the service left beta back in June of this year. The new release, launching tomorrow, is an entirely unified experience thanks to the addition of a much-requested file organization tool, explains the service’s Director of Project Management Rick Treitman.

Also new are 35 user-requested features, including file searching capabilities and integrations with web services like Flickr and Google Image Search. However, one of the most exciting pieces to the upgraded service is the newly launched mobile component. With Acrobat.com’s smartphone application, users won’t just have access to their files on the go – they can also scan in new documents with their phone’s camera.

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The New File Organizer

The one major new feature in this release of Acrobat.com is the file organizer. Before, files could live in three different places on the service. Now all files are accessible through one main interface.

<img src=”http://www.family-learning-center.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/b93a8_acrobat_file_organizer.png”

The file organizer itself includes some handy features, too. Instead of using a traditional folder structure like you have on your computer’s hard drive, the service introduces something called “collections.” These are more like iTunes playlists than file folders (or even labels in Gmail) because files can be assigned to multiple collections instead of having to sit in just one folder.

Another key component to the organizer is a file search tool. Believe it or not, the online service had no way of helping you find your files until now. Although the current search capabilities don’t yet offer full text search of your documents, Adobe says that may come further down the road.

Also new is the organizer’s “import and edit” feature which lets you open external files directly into the appropriate program so you can begin to work on them online. In the past, you had to first launch the program, then import the file. This time-saving step is more akin to what rival Google Docs offers via their upload feature except that in Acrobat.com, you don’t have to click a link to open the uploaded file – it happens automatically.

Other New Features

The various online office programs themselves have seen improvements as well in this new release. Buzzword is leaving beta and now it, along with Presentations, lets you import images from online services like Flickr and Google Images in addition to the images found on your computer. One drawback to this feature, though, is that the online image searches don’t offer filtering by license type, so a user could easily get into trouble by adding a copyrighted or otherwise licensed photo into their document if they neglect to check permissions first.

The Tables app, still in beta, now has the ability to do more data sorting and filtering. It also adds new views including a print layout view that shows what the document will look like on the printed page.

Acrobat.com Comes to iPhone, Blackberry

One of the more exciting developments is the new Acrobat.com mobile application which will be made available to Blackberry and iPhone users shortly. Built in conjunction with a company called scanR, the mobile application lets users take advantage of their mobile phone’s camera to add new files to the service. After taking the photo, the app uses OCR technology to convert the image to text. How well this works is unknown at this time because the app has not yet arrived in the respective app stores.

The app also lets users view their files in a read-only mode, convert them to PDFs, and share them with others via fax or email. There will be two versions of the app made available – a free version and a premium offering which will allow for more PDF conversions and faxes.

According to Adobe, the Acrobat.com service is faring well. They already have 6 million users and add around 100,000 more each week. While a lot of users are students and SMB owners looking for a free alternative to more expensive Microsoft Office software, the company says they’re also seeing the service picked up and used in small workgroups at larger companies. However, Adobe admits that they’re not an enterprise play yet and they also won’t reveal how many people use the premium version of the service – only that they’re “happy” with the number thus far.

If you want to try the upgraded online suite, you can do so at www.acrobat.com as of tomorrow (Saturday, November 21st) at 6 AM EST.

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INQ To Build Spotify Branded Phone

Wow, if nothing else, new European music service Spotify, which is yet to launch in the U.S., has captured everyone’s attention. TechCrunch Europe reports that Swedish telecommunication service provider Telia will soon release a Spotify-branded mobile phone.

A source with knowledge of the deal tells us that London, UK based INQ is developing the Spotify-branded phone. The company already creates phones with tight integrations to social networking services like Facebook, Skype and Windows Live Messenger.

INQ is backed by Li Ka-Shing, who recently invested in Spotify.

We’re still gathering details on this, such as date of availability and price. The phone is in the design stage right now, and there are plans, we’re told, to roll it out to all markets via partnerships with various carriers.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Boomi Widgets Ease SaaS Integration

Boomi is a platform for on-demand integration of software as a service. Until recently, all their tools for migrating and manipulating data from SaaS applications were self-service: you built a custom pipeline from point A to point B every time.

Now, business users with little-to-no coding ability can create connections between their favorite apps with Boomi Widgets that are pre-built. Speed and ease of integration is a major concern for SaaS use in the enterprise, and these widgets show great potential for streamlining that process.

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The regular version of Boomi supports a full range of standard business software, from Quickbooks to Oracle Database and SAP ERP. Boomi’s widgets are basically browser-based GUI controllers for how information is ported from a SaaS application and either another software as a service or an on-premise solution. They make it easy for anyone with a little knowledge about how tables work to integrate enterprise software platforms and create a pipeline of information that is extensible.

Any Boomi customer can create one of these widgets from their integrations that already exist, and this should save businesses the time and energy usually invested in creating the same integrations over and over again.

Boomi also says that soon anyone will be able to create and sell a widget on their platform with a significant revenue share. However, it looks like currently only the Salesforce.com and Netsuite connections have been widgetized and offered on the site. Unless Boomi picks up the pace and gets a wider array of them out on the market, this isn’t going to create any kind of significant marketplace.

<img alt=”Boomi Widget 4.png” src=”http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/assets_c/2009/07/Boomi Widget 4-thumb-462×404-7332.png”
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