The available options for doing traditional desktop applications online has expanded again. Adobe (Acrobat.com) recently allowed access to a suite of services including Buzzword (word processing) and ConnectNow (online conferencing and white board). Our distance education ventures at UND use Adobe Connect so it is interesting to see a similar free product with the same capabilities I use every week.
For the time being online apps (Google Docs, Zoho) are free, but have other significant advantages. I like the the opportunity to connect from anywhere and any machine. These features seem perfectly suited to the educational environment in which students work from home and school and may connect from different machines in the same lab or library. No more excuses about forgetting your homework.
What is often missed when exploring educational possibilities is the collaborative opportunities providers have added to their web-based applications. I must say I have not used Zoho tools for some time and cannot remember what capabilities are included. I use Google docs a lot and share documents with colleagues for the purpose of collaborative editing. I have yet to use the new Adobe site for actual work, but I have spent some time exploring the features of the word processing program. My first impressions were very positive. Adobe also recently released the online Adobe Photoshop Express. These products are not accessible as a suite at present, but unless Adobe has some plan for a subscription service for some but not all products in mind, it would make sense to see common access for these products/services in the future.
The limitations for the Acrobat site appear to be 5 gigs of storage and 3 participants in a conferencing session.
ReadWriteWeb provides a nice review of Acrobat.com.
