I recently did a review on Adobe’s acrobat.com site that allows document storage, document editing, collaboration and screen sharing, file sharing and more.
The part of the acrobat.com site that allows for document editing is called Buzzword. Buzzword is a pretty powerful web based application that allows you to edit documents online in a word processor that somewhat resembles the big guys like Microsoft Word.
Buzzword is not as feature packed as Microsoft Word but for most tasks it will probably do just fine. There is no charge for acrobat.com or Buzzword so it is hard to complain that they are not full featured
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This is the initial release of Buzzword, so I suspect that sometime in the near future new features will be added.
One cool thing about Buzzword and acrobat.com is they allow collaboration between multiple users. You can share files, share documents, etc. It also appears that more than one person can be editing the same file at the same time without losing work.
If you compare it to the other free word processors out there, buzzword is better than any that I have seen. Also, you can access your document from anywhere on the Internet. But yes, you need to be connected to the internet to get to it. So you cannot just take your laptop out to lake where you have no internet and work on your document.
There is also an Adobe AIR based version of the acrobat.com suite of programs. I am not sure if it can run without the internet or not, that is something I will have to research and update everyone on. The little bit of research I did on the AIR version did not turn out happy comments. Most comments were that it was hard to use.
Check back soon for an update on the AIR version of acrobat.
Bottom line, Buzzword is great for most regular word processing, it is free and has nice collaboration capabilities. But if you need the advanced features that are available in Microsoft Word, then Buzzword is not there yet. But by all means, check it out.