It's a more aggressive marketing stance for Adobe as Acrobat branches out into online applications, more and better document collaboration, and Flash animation embedding.

The functionality gap is narrowing between Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat, at least in the category of document production. Granted, Acrobat has no counterpart to Excel. But Office has no counterpart to Flash either, and its integration into the creation of both PDF documents and PDF-based presentations -- a feature greatly expanded in Adobe's Acrobat 9 series, officially released today -- is likely to give customers reason to compare the two suites side-by-side.

So the question becomes, is the Acrobat document production portion of the Acrobat suite becoming a word processor? There's a mixed answer to that question. For general purpose use, such as business correspondence, Acrobat is not even close to an alternative to Word. However, businesses that publish finished documents, either for internal purposes or as products they produce for sale, are graduating to Acrobat as their document creation platform, rather than create text in Word and import it into a PDF.

And Adobe's approach to filling the general-purpose document creation gap is indeed compelling, if not yet 100% complete. It's presenting a simple word processor as a Web service available online: specifically, its Buzzword package. It's a relatively well-designed tool that does produce PDF files, though it lacks some of the features that would make it applicable for everyday use, such as correspondence or resume templates.

Putting that tool online, however, is designed to compel users into Acrobat.com, which is where Adobe will be adding new functionality as time goes on. Right now, it also offers services for online storage, sharing, and collaboration, in an obvious effort to compete against Microsoft Office and SharePoint. Adobe's value proposition is that Acrobat with Acrobat.com could provide an alternative that's easier to deploy and maintain, and that's less expensive.

"Real-time collaboration on a server that you don't have to configure makes shared reviews a quantum leap in Acrobat development," reads an article by independent contributor Ted Padova to Adobe's user community site. "This new feature is a huge welcome for any Acrobat users who have wanted to engage in Shared Reviews, but were unable to host files on a server properly configured for sharing reviews. In Acrobat 9, Adobe has taken care of all the server configurations--all you have to do is choose Comments > Send for Shared Review."

The new version tries once again to create a kind of packaging feature that wraps PDF components into one unit, this time called "Portfolio." With more extensive testing of this feature this time around, we can hope this new incarnation works better than Adobe's previous tries.

But what will likely be the piece de resistance for this round of Acrobat is the ability to include Flash videos in PDF files, including presentations. Currently, the Flash creation system is an application in a different suite entirely -- the CS3 creative suite. Adobe's approach to filling the gap for everyday Flash creation is, frankly, novel -- especially since it leverages Microsoft's own market share position.

It's an add-on that's part of Acrobat 9's Pro Extended edition (the replacement for Acrobat 8 3D) called Presenter. It lets users create animated presentations in PowerPoint, and then export them into a Window where the Flash-iness, if you will, of the product can then be tweaked for maximum effect. The final product is exported as a PDF file with the Flash already embedded, rather than as a Flash file that gets dropped into a PDF through Acrobat.

Of Adobe's three editions, the basic document generation package Acrobat 9 Standard will sell in the US for $299 (or $99 for upgrades from earlier versions). Acrobat 9 Pro (no longer "Professional") will sell for $449 ($159 upgrade), and Acrobat 9 Pro Extended will sell for $699 ($229).