Acrobat.com springs out of beta and into the charging zone

Adobe is taking Acrobat.com out of beta in the US on Monday, and turning it into a business with paid user accounts.

The service, which has more than five million registered users will retain its free version, however there are now usage limitations on certain features that can be unlocked by upgrading to one of the two new premium plans. These can be purchased on a monthly or yearly basis and cost $14.99 or $39 per month, or $149 or $390 per year respectively.

The "premium basic" plan allows for 10 PDF conversions per month, as well as up to five meeting participants though Adobe's ConnectNow tool. The "premium plus" plan dials that up to unlimited PDF conversions, and meetings with up to 20 users. Both premium plans also gain phone and web support. In comparison, free users will only be able to convert five PDFs, and connect with two people at once in ConnectNow, which is just one less connection than users were able to have during Acrobat's beta period.

Along with the move to paid accounts, Acrobat.com is getting a new collaborative app called Tables that handles basic spreadsheets. Just like Buzzword, Adobe's online word processor, this lets multiple users work on a spreadsheet at once, as well as track revisions and roll back to earlier versions.

Eric Larson, who is Adobe's director of product management and marketing for Acrobat.com, told silicon.com sister site CNET News last week that Tables is not quite ready to replace Microsoft's Excel, which is why it's being rolled out in Adobe's Acrobat Labs section first.

Larson did stress, however, that it will allow users to do things Excel can't, like see where other people are on the document, and provide a subtle warning when users are making a visual change that will affect others.

Little things that users are used to doing in normal software, like changing a column width or sorting order, yields a small warning message that tells them to think twice if there are other people working on it at the same time. It also provides the option to switch to "private view", which lets users make edits without the changes going live to the main document. Adobe is hoping this type of work flow will cut down on the email overload, and versioning problems that typical office software creates.

Will the changes be enough to woo users to pay up who were previously getting some of these things for free? Adobe seems to think so, and is still allowing users free and unlimited access to Buzzword, Presentations, and now Tables. The big thing that changes with today's news is an expansion of the services that let users share what they've created with these free tools.

Adobe is eventually hoping to get Acrobat.com beyond the browser and get its AIR application up to parity, so that users will be able to use these same apps, and access their work off the browser. The company is also trying to get people access to these files and applications on mobile devices, where they'll be able to make edits and even create new documents, although this isn't coming until later this year.

Following that, Adobe is working on an upgrade to its PDF technology that will show others when a change has been made by anyone else who is collaborating on it.

With Acrobat.com, Adobe is coming a little late to a game that Google, Zoho and ThinkFree have been running for years, and that Microsoft is set to join very soon. What may make the difference is that Adobe can work these products very deeply into other pieces of its software. Whether that ends up being a liability compared to competing products that remain web-only is unclear.

Original article: Adobe makes Acrobat.com a business with paid accounts from CNET News.com