Adobe Systems has poured out inventions with the new release of its Adobe Acrobat product line, a toolbox brimming with an impressive array of potential for business collaboration.

Acrobat has always been a collaboration tool for sharing information. It has two flavors: Acrobat Reader, a free and widely distributed viewer, and a line of authoring products to convert most displays on screen—everything from spreadsheets to text documents to 3-D CAD files—into locked, portable images that you can share with others, whether they have the software used to create the original or not.

The power of Acrobat 8 comes from the authoring tools and the capabilities they can embed in the documents, such as active fields and digital signatures, and extend to users of Reader. But now, for the first time, the entire product line, including Reader, also comes with a tool that can set up meetings online and with telephone between 15 people—more with higher-tier versions—with the simple circulation of a Website URL.

Meetings in Acrobat Connect are launched from a button on the toolbar of the Acrobat products. It can also be installed in many other products, such as Microsoft Word and Excel. Users subscribe to the meeting-hosting service for a flat rate of $39 a month for up to 15 participants. The service is scalable: larger crowds can get more a advanced tool by paying more. But even first-level users get a virtual meeting room with a dedicated URL and call-in number.

To call a meeting, a user simply launches Connect and logs on. That action opens a browser window to their meeting room. They can distribute an e-mail notice from within it. Any recipient of the URL, password and call-in number can join the meeting, as long as they have Adobe Flash, another free and widely distributed product, installed. Adobe says 97% of the computers worldwide already have that capability.

Once in the meeting, participants can share common views of files, folders, sidebar chats and even video cams in the common space. The meeting service is also offering free trials until the end of the year.

Acrobat 8's authoring products have many enhancements, including the ability to package multiple documents without combining them into a single PDF. That can cause problems when trying to maintain individual document and digital signature integrity when circulating packages of information.