Adobe brings its own PowerPoint-style app to the cloud

Acrobat.com Presentations offers way to create simple Flash-based slideshow presentations online which can be worked on by numerous Adobe.com members simultaneously and then be presented from their online location or exported as .PDF files for offline use.

The app's interface is similar to Adobe's Web-based Photoshop Express, and provides a comparable level of functionality: basic, but elegant and aesthetically pleasing. While the same Adobe user ID can be used to access both Presentations and Photoshop Express, the two applications are actually separate branches of Adobe's growing arsenal of Web-based services.

Presentations is being grouped with Adobe's Buzzword document collaboration tool, the ConnectNow, Web conferencing tool, as well as Share, CreatePDF, and My Files on Acrobat.com.

The product right now is oddly balanced. For example, there is no way to embed audio in a presentation yet, an essentially basic function. However, a fully-featured piece of desktop software such as Powerpoint 2010 does not include the kind of live multi-user collaboration that Presentations currently has. Since it's still an early build, the application has a great deal of potential.