Adobe Adds Collaborative Word Processor to Arsenal

The war for the future of online-connected desktop applications opened some new battlefronts today. At its Adobe MAX conference currently taking place in Chicago, the San Jose, California-based company announced a new, collaborative word processing acquisition and several other developments targeted to this new arena.

Adobe said that it would acquire Virtual Ubiquity, a company that developed a “ground-breaking online word processor” called Buzzword that runs on AIR. Although these terms might sound like the makings for a joke about vaporware, Adobe’s AIR is a cross-platform runtime that enables online applications to be extended to the desktop.

The acquisition is part of Adobe’s strategy to develop an “ecosystem” for rich Internet applications (RIAs) that combine online and desktop experiences, are built using its Flex framework, and run using AIR and its Flash player.

Share Service, Business Objects

Buzzword allows people to create word processing documents, enabling users to work with documents that are both local to their machines and shared online.

The chief advantages are that documents can be accessed from anywhere, and permission-setting can help facilitate version control. Office productivity tools with an online component are a hot area these days, with products from Google, IBM, and others. Microsoft this week announced Office Live Workspace, which enables Office users to access and share documents online.

As it maneuvers against the other software giants for this new territory, Adobe is hoping it will be able to duplicate earlier successes. For instance, David Mendels, an Adobe senior vice president, compared the collaboration on and sharing of Buzzword documents to PDFs.

Adobe said it will be adding a new file-sharing service called Share, now in beta, that will make sharing documents easier. Share was also built with Flex, and includes a set of APIs so that developers can create mash-ups with data from different applications, or they can…