Alfresco this week announced that Adobe's Acrobat.com has incorporated their enterprise content management functionality into its suite of tools. Adobe has used Alfresco's content repository on the back end of Acrobat.com to support the site's sharing and collaboration features.This isn't the first collaboration between Adobe and Alfresco, whose open source enterprise content management software has earned it positive reviews. Adobe LiveCycle Content Services ES, released earlier this year, was their first partnership, so they have some good collaborative history.

Acrobat.com has five key components - Buzzword, a web-based collaborative word processor, ConnectNow web conferencing, Create PDF which allows documents be converted into PDF files, Share which allows centrally hosted documents to be shared with others, and My Files which is a document and file repository. Of these, the Share and My Files applications are powered, at least in part, by Alfresco.

CMSWire's James Mowery posted an insightful piece on the partnership:

Adobe had a problem - the company needed a product that could scale well, support millions of users, store terabytes of data, run parallel with multiple machines, be upgraded while running and allow users to collaborate. Alfresco was the solution. After discussing their moves and showing Adobe a prototype in San Jose, Calif. around 6 months ago, both companies agreed to move forward with putting the site into production.

It's good to see the Acrobat.com suite evolving and improving. Although Buzzword garnered most of the press when it was released a few months ago, the site, which is still in beta, has a lot to offer and is clearly focused on making incremental improvements.