Adobe Monday introduced Acrobat.com, a palette of hosted collaboration tools, and unveiled Acrobat 9, which features the first built-in integration with Flash. 

Acrobat.com, which is available in beta, follows in the footsteps of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others in offering collaboration tools online. Acrobat.com is a collection of five tools: Buzzword (text editing), Share (document sharing), ConnectNow  (Web conferencing from Macromedia acquisition), My Files (file organizer) and Create PDF (document conversion).

Adobe plans to keep free versions of these tools available indefinitely and offer premium versions for a fee. The company did not give a timeframe on how long the beta would run or when the premium versions would ship.

"Online is where everything is going; it is so much easier to work online with documents," says Rick Treitman, Adobe's entrepreneur in residence. "As you work on the Web, you find more and more reason to stay there."

With Acrobat 9, slated to ship next month and Adobe Reader, the company has built in Flash and used it to support slick interfaces, audio/video, and screen sharing within PDF files. The goal is to ensure the slate of Acrobat tools can support collaboration between and among individuals and groups of workers.

Other new features include PDF Portfolio, a Flash-based user interface added to PDF Packages technology introduced in Acrobat 8, which lets users collect multiple media types into a single compressed PDF file. Adobe also updated Adobe Presenter, which lets users add video, voice-overs or interactive quizzes to slides then share them in PDF format. Also new is the ability to synchronize document views among users, expanded 3D features, an update to tools for creating and managing PDF forms, and integration with Acrobat.com.

The Acrobat.com site is Adobe's biggest statement about its goals in the online collaboration world. The first set of tools is decidedly consumer focused, but company officials say optimized corporate versions of all its online tools are in the works.

For example, Buzzword will be updated using the Adobe Air runtime environment so it can be used offline as well as online. Currently, users must be connected to the Internet to use the tools.

Integration with Flash running in the browser will maintain the rich presentation environment and support cross platform use, according to Adobe.

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