Adobe Launches Document Center
Publishing giant Adobe has announced a new hosted service for businesses and individuals to securely share and manage documents. It’s called Adobe Document Center, and it works on top of Adobe’s own Acrobat 8 as well as Microsoft Word and Excel documents to provide a secure and flexible platform for tracking and storing sensitive documents.
It’s a hosted web service, so there’s nothing to download and install. It works in all modern browsers that can run Flash (OK, so maybe there’s one thing you might have to install) since it’s built with Flex, Adobe’s platform for database-driven webapps.
I watched a demo of the Document Center yesterday, and it looks like a good internal solution for small businesses, especially shops with remote users or freelancers who need secure access to proprietary documents from anywhere in the world.
Users can log in to the webapp with a verified email address and deposit their files. When it’s time to share and collaborate on a document, the creator can assign permissions to any verified user in the system. The documents can be downloaded through the browser or simply passed around in emails. They’re locked when they are sent out, so the user must unlock each document once it’s on his or her desktop. All of the permissions can be adjusted remotely, so owners can disable documents and revoke access on docs that have already been distributed. Users with the sufficient privileges can also set expiration dates and times, which made me think of those communiques on Mission: Impossible that self-destruct after 30 seconds.
Version control is built in, as well. If there’s a new version, just send out an alert, and everyone who has an old version of a document will be prompted to download the latest version. Remote access and versioning is logged for every document that passes through the app, so you can track who opened, printed, emailed and read each version of each document.
There are some more features on the way in 2007, including advanced commenting and route tracking functions. There’s also the possibility that Adobe will add the ability to store and share other file formats, like InDesign and Photoshop files, but the Adobe representatives were tight-lipped about that yesterday.
The Document Center is free to try out from now until the end of the year. In 45 days, it will become a subscription-based product that will cost $20 a month or $200 per year.
The Document Center is powered by Adobe’s LiveCycle Policy Server, an enterprise product for permissions management. Any business running LiveCycle software and a J2EE service can run a copy of the Document Center locally. The hosted route seems like the way to go for most potential customers, though.
