Adobe Acrobat to gain Instant Messaging tools

Adobe is to integrate enterprise instant messaging and presence cap­abilities into its Acrobat software following its acquisition of specialist supplier Antepo at the end of January.

Analyst firm Gartner said the move would help Adobe to offer a collaboration suite that could compete with IBM Lotus and Microsoft products, while integrating with their instant messaging and collaboration systems.

One trend among collaboration software suppliers is to link into IP-based telephony platforms from the likes of Cisco and Nortel.

Gartner said, "With this acquisition, Adobe gains a presence engine that could potentially be tied to IP telephony infrastructure, federates with multiple instant messaging networks, and runs on Windows and Linux."

As a result, businesses would be able to unite users working on different suppliers' systems, through e-mail, instant messaging, conferencing, or IP phone, enabling them to work together on documents, Gartner said.