Thursday, October 11, 2007

Adobe acquires an online word publishing tool - Buzzword

Adobe has purchased a company called Virtual Ubiquity along with its technology - an online word processor called Buzzword (you can sign up for a beta account now to give it a try.)

Buzzword will become a part of Adobe's existing online "document collaboration services, including: Adobe PDF Online to easily create PDF files online or from the desktop; Adobe Document Center to help people retain control of documents and track their usage; and Adobe Acrobat® Connect™ software for affordable web conferencing."

The online application is a very, very easy interface to use. The strength of Buzzword is the ability to share your documents....and do this quickly. Buzzword is built on the Flash platform with "prototype support for Adobe AIR to allow for offline work."

With each document you can email it to as many people as you like. These people can be:

  • a co-author: with full editing rights
  • reviewer: read and comment on the document
  • reader: can read the document but not make any changes or comment
A history follows each document as it goes through a collaboration process.

You can save your documents (online in Buzzword) as a buzzword format, Microsoft Word (.doc), Microsoft Word 2003 XML (.xml), Rich Text Format (.rtf), with more formats to come.

Classroom....
As this is a web based tool it allows students or teachers to easily collaborate on projects. Students working together in teams, students submitting essay drafts or final documents to teachers......give this tool a try in your classroom!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am using this every day as my document creation tool. It has all the features I need AND so easy to collaborate on documents with the comment tool etc. Adding images is so simple, rescaling images easy, importing word documents and exporting them is a breeze. Coming soon will be export to pdf - making this a great communication and collaboration tool. Love it! John