I have something I need to SHARE
Wow. So much to talk about. The last 3 weeks or so have been a whirlwind – working long hours to ship our software, getting added to the MAX keynote, the Buzzword acquisition, talking to a ton of bloggers, and, to top it all of, finally getting notice of our adoption going through and having to get ready for a trip to Vietnam on short notice. Amazing.
But here we are late Sunday night – I just arrived in Chicago for MAX and our product’s press release has hit the wires. So now I get to talk about what I and a great team of talented folks have been working on for the last half year. Its a web service that makes it easy for you to collaborate on documents, code-named “SHARE” (it was a last minute name change, in case you were wondering). SHARE allows you to store your documents on the service and share them with others, either via email, via a link to a URL, or by embedding a preview in your webpage YouTube-style. Here’s a screenshot of the main interface (click to view fullsize):
But the coolest part of the product, in my opinion, is the previewing technology. When you are logged in you can preview documents just by double clicking them, but we also support previewing for people you share the document with:
Right now the previewer works for PDF and image files, but in the near future we’ll add support for MS Office and OpenDocument formats. We also make it possible for you to embed a previewer in your own web pages. I’d show you one now, but wordpress doesn’t allow flash embedding (rats!). I’m going to have to go talk to them about that…
I’m also very proud of our REST APIs, which we think will let people do all kinds of interesting things with our service. I’ll have more on that in a future post.
We’ve got other cool stuff coming: integration with buzzword, a printer driver that lets you print directly from any application to SHARE as a PDF, an AIR application, and much more.
The release right now is a limited beta, in the true sense of the word: the software is still rough around the edges. But we’re releasing it now because we think that its pretty usable even in its current state, and we want to get feedback on the UI and start talking to people about the integration possibilities. But give it a try: there may still be some slots open:
Shebanator 
Wow, sounds and looks really cool. If you don’t mind me asking: Are all my shared files uploaded to Adobe’s servers? I’d love to install SHARE on my own webspace! Is every single person that wants to view the files required to create an Adobe ID?
Yes, all the files are stored on Adobe’s servers. We don’t have any plans to make a version available to install on your own servers at this time – right now the system requires several diifferent servers behinds the scenes – servers to do thumbnailing and PDF->SWF transcoding, servers to handle web traffic, database servers, and storage servers. Making it all run on a single machine would be no small feat.
Okay, thanks for the fast response. Suppose I was to use this for my print-ready pdf files, both my client and the printer guy would require an Adobe ID to view and/or download the PDF?
No, only the document owner (you) needs an account to share files with someone. If you share the file with “Open Access” we don’t require a login to view/download – just knowing the URL is enough. And the URLs themselves aren’t very guessable (they’re basically GUIDs), so the odds of someone finding the document accidentally are pretty low.
On the other hand, if you specify limited access, the file has an access control list. That does require everyone who wants to view the file to have an Adobe ID to authenticate with. More secure, but more overhead for the people you share documents with. Which one you choose depends on how secure you need the information to be.
Okay, thank you very much. You’ve certainly got my attention with SHARE. 😉