Adobe starts charging for online applications

Software firm Adobe said this morning that its acrobat.com web site is out of beta and will sell two subscription services aimed at business.

The big idea is for the site to become an online destination for teams to collaborate, according to Adobe – but today it is offering “premium” subscription services that are supposed to answer “intense collaboration” needs that business people need.

Both of these offerings include Adobe phone and Web support programs – the Premium “basic” service includes ConnectNow web meeting for five participants and online conversion of 10 uploaded documents to PDF a month.

The Premium “plus” service will let 20 people to meet online and unlimited online creation of PDF files.

Adobe seems serious about this because it’s plans to extend acrobat.com to offer a heap more tools including shared team workspaces, integration with Adobe, Microsoft Outlook and Open Office, and increased support for the Adobe developer community.