Adobe’s work productivity business is getting a subscription overhaul with the announcement today of the company’s new Document Cloud. Much like the Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud before it, the Document Cloud offerings are designed to give professionals a suite of tools for handling documents at the price of a single monthly subscription.
Unsurprisingly, it’s based around Acrobat, Adobe’s software for authoring and editing PDFs. The cloud will give users a single document-storage location that syncs between their computers and mobile devices. Adobe has also redesigned Acrobat from the ground up with an emphasis on touch-friendliness (for Windows tablet users), adding the ability to convert photos into PDFs and then edit them, and making it easier for users to access key tools within the app.
One of the important technologies integrated into the Document Cloud is Adobe’s electronic signature product, based on its acquisition of EchoSign in 2005. Anyone with a Document Cloud subscription will be able to send other people documents to sign using the EchoSign service. In addition, Adobe is making just the EchoSign capabilities available for $1.99 a month.
It’s a swipe at DocuSign, which has taken off as one of the leaders of the growing e-signature market. In an interview with GeekWire, Jon Perera, Adobe’s vice president of product management, said the company believes Document Cloud will be a more appealing choice for enterprises because, first, much of the enterprise PDF workflow already revolves around Acrobat, and second, Adobe’s expertise with the PDF format (which it created) makes it a logical choice for managing signatures and forms inside those documents.
“And then the third thing, Adobe doesn’t really believe that e-sign is a category that’s unique or should be a point offering,” he said. “Really, what we want to do is to deliver a product for enterprises (with) a broader set of digital document capabilities. E-sign is just one of the most important things to do, but you also have to do things like get approvals, track changes, enable end users to create and edit PDFs with a really high degree of capability.”
Much like the company’s Creative Cloud push last year, Adobe is also launching a set of apps for iOS and Android that extend the reach of the Document Cloud to mobile devices. That push is spearheaded by Adobe’s new Fill and Sign app, a free app that will let people snap a photo with their device’s camera, and get that translated into a document that they can then fill in with text and a digital signature before sending it off again.
People who want to do heavy-duty document editing can use the new Acrobat Mobile app, which brings many of the desktop app’s capabilities to the iPad and Android tablets. Users will be able to download the app for free, and then purchase upgrades to access more features as they need them, up to a full Document Cloud Pro subscription.
All of the Document Cloud products are set to become available in the next 30 days. Users who want to get the most Document Cloud features can get a Pro subscription, which costs $14.99 a month. The Standard subscription costs $12.99 a month. Adobe will offer bulk pricing for large enterprises, but the exact cost hasn’t been determined.
