For the past two years, Adobe has been evolving a suite of online collaboration tools at its Acrobat.com website (the first services came online in June 2008). The latest iteration launches today with the release of Acrobat.com Workspaces. This new service lets users create virtual workspaces where they can share files and folders with others both within and outside their organization. It's the vital collaboration piece that adds a workgroup dimension to all the existing tools: document sharing, PDF creator, web conferencing, Buzzword word processing, presentations and the spreadsheet-like Tables for sharing data. At last, the suite is complete and ready for use in a business collaboration setting. But it's far from fully baked yet — the list of capabilities and features yet to be added remains far longer than those already available.
Most users of the service won't be concerned at the lack of more sophisticated options because Adobe is targeting people who are currently using emails and USB sticks to share information. "We are competing against email," director of product management Rick Treitman told me in a briefing last week. Or, he went on, citing a phrase coined by Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma, the classic business book about disruptive innovations, "We're competing against non-consumption." In other words, Workspaces is designed to appeal to people who are just getting by with workarounds at the moment and who will only start using an online collaboration tool if it's easy, convenient and cheap enough.
So Workspaces is free if you only want to set up a single virtual workspace, and $15 per month for up to 20, or $39 per month for an unlimited number. There's no limit on the number of collaborators you invite to participate in any workspace. Adobe expects the service will mostly be used when an individual or team within an organization want to share files with sub-contractors and suppliers and/or with customers and sales partners. In today's highly distributed world, of course (in part due to the Web making long-distance communications easier and cheaper), such collaborations are becoming more and more commonplace.
There are already dozens of similar services of varying functionality and scope already in the market, and several of them have been covered on this blog — notable examples include Central Desktop, Box.net and Google Apps. Adobe may be a latecomer, but it has reach, which is a vital success ingredient in this type of application. The brand is well known and trusted, and there are already more ten million people signed up to the Acrobat.com website, with around 100,000 more joining every week. So there's no shortage of people to whom Adobe can market the new Workspaces service. Making it free for collaborators adds an extra slug of virality, because as each new workspace is created, so a new set of collaborators gets introduced to the service. There will come a time when the market starts to standardize and it will become harder to persuade collaborators to join a service that's not one of the established platforms. We're not there yet but Adobe's user base gives it a strong advantage in contention — provided, that is, it can preserve the ubiquity of Flash technology, on which the suite of tools are built.
As time goes on, though, the breadth of functionality will become more important, and the winners in this market will be those who offer the right mix of functions to the broadest user base. Like any contender, Adobe's challenge is to incorporate the right functions at the right time. Workspaces currently lacks important capabilities, such as a mechanism for change notifications (for example, allowing people to subscribe to an RSS feed or Twitter stream to get alerts when a workspace is updated). Mobile support is still in the pipeline, as is a central administration function for setting and managing sign-ups and policies across a set of workspaces, which will be important for the enterprise market — at present, if you need to remove a collaborator, perhaps because they leave their job or their company gets bought by a competitor, you have to remove them from each workspace separately rather than in a single operation. Similarly (although this is probably a good thing in terms of Acrobat.com's freedom to develop in response to its own market) it's somewhat surprising how little integration there is to Adobe's mainstream enterprise collaboration suite, Adobe LiveCycle.
On my personal wishlist is the ability to work in a document locally on my own laptop or desktop machine and have that automatically sync with the shared version stored online. We're still a long way from ubiquitous connectivity (I can't work online when I'm traveling on the London Underground, for example) but it's a pain remembering to manually check-in and check-out. The problem with synching to shared documents is, what happens if two users independently update the same document at the same time? Technology has not yet fully solved this problem. It's probably only going to work well with applications that are architected from the ground-up for shared synchronization, such as Buzzword (and unlike Microsoft Word). We're still a long way off from seeing it in mainstream, everyday use.
Therefore, I believe, we are today in the earliest phase of adoption of online collaboration. There are many more twists and turns in the road before the market standardization I've talked about starts to crystallize. Until then, Adobe and its competitors have many difficult choices to make as to which functions they should prioritize first to capture the most market and mindshare. Workspaces brings the company to the starting line, but it still faces a marathon cross-country race ahead.
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