Recently i looked at Microsoft SkyDrive as online storage mechanism and actively use Google Docs to hold a lot of my documents. Adobe is coming out with a similar offering in terms of online document storage and collaboration.

Main Features

• Its an online word processor
• It allows you to store and access your documents from anywhere (internet access permitting)
• Its got an excellent collaboration functionality – allows multiple authors to make changes to the same document
• Key to any collaboration tool is tracking changes, versioning and reviewing edits. It comes with an tools to do all these things.
• Ability to add comments to the document inline as well as controlling access to documents/functions through roles.
• It supports image imbedding and formatting words around these images.

Right.. so lets take this for a quick test drive…

Prerequisites

In order to start using Buzzwords, you’ll first need (yes you guessed it), a username and password. Buzzwords uses Adobe Id to define its users. So, before we go on, lets create a username for us to use.

Step 1

Open up your favourite web browser and go to http://www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/ . You’ll see a "Sign Up Now" button on the top right hand corner. Click it to be taken to their login/sign up page.

Click on Sign Up! at the bottom of the login box.

Fill in the form that pops up in screen to complete the registration process and it will sign you in automatically.

Note: Google Chrome users may get an Unsupported Browser warning. It suggests running Buzzword on IE, Firefox or Safari.. strange! It did have a link to tell me to try anyway in case i’m feeling adventurous :)

If you have just registered, you’ll need to verify your email. So feel free to do that via your Inbox and then navigate to https://buzzword.acrobat.com to sign in.

Step 2

Once logged in, you’ll see the main working screen of Buzzword.

You can import a document here or create a new one by clicking on the Document Menu.

Feel free to mouse over all the various buttons and seeing what they do. The user interface looks sleek but takes some getting used to. Its Macromedia driven, so has all the usual swishes and sliding menus..

Step 3

I created a new document and started putting some text in. Again, the user interface is slightly different to popular word processors (such as Microsoft Word) but once i got used to it, using the word processor was actually quick and painless.

Again, the menu bar expands and rolls to show you your current choices as well as available options. I got used to the icons really quickly.

Adding images was quick and painless as was adding comments and doing spell checks.

Once you have finished with the document, you can print it out or save it using the Document menu. Closing the document takes you back to the main menu.

Closing thoughts

With features such as sharing and history/versioning and the ability to import documents from a variety of sources, i can see a future for Buzzword as a quick online editor and document manager. It will be useful in particular to students who would like the word count facility as well as the ability to access ones document from anywhere.

The Document Organiser (ie, main screen) can get cluttered and i haven’t found a way to create folders yet..

I liked the image upload and formatting options. The texts flows around the image appropriately and resizing an image was as simple as clicking on a corner and dragging.

It could do with more Fonts though and sometimes, dragging an image to the right of a paragraph can get problematic with it dropping everywhere but at the end.

Will it be a viable replacement for Google Docs? I actually think there is a space in the market for a product that specialises in word processing and gets very good at document collaboration and authoring. Google Docs tries to bring all manner of document authoring to the front. Adobe Buzzword just sticks to one of those products and they have shown that not every word processor out there has to mimic Microsoft Word to be useful.

If you need more information or help when using Buzzword, the first document that is available on your dashboard is "Welcome to Buzzword" – this is a good read for more information on the features available to you.

I’ve intentionally kept this article open-ended as I want to encourage the readers to play around for themselves and make their own mind up. Its not a product that will replace your desktop/laptop word processor, but with moves towards lighter applications and cloud computing, this may just be what the future looks likes a few years from now…

Relevant Links:

• https://buzzword.acrobat.com – Main page for Buzzword
• http://www.adobe.com/acom/buzzword/ – Adobe Information Page for Buzzword