Industry News Desk

Adobe says Acrobat 9.0, a major upgrade, will be available in July and in three different versions: Standard, Pro and Pro Extended.

It will be sold standalone and Pro will be integrated into Adobe’s Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and Standard editions. CS 3.3 is also due in July.

New features and functionalities include native support for Flash so users can combine video, audio, animation and application files in the same PDF document and support for 256-bit encryption. It just takes a free Adobe Reader to open one of these newfangled PDFs.

Users will also be able to create customized layouts or pick from several templates, a scheme Adobe calls PDF Portfolios.

Pricing will run from $99 for upgrades of Standard to $699 for Pro Extended, which includes Adobe Presenter, software that turns PowerPoint presentations into multimedia.

There is also a public beta of Acrobat.com available now, an online Adobe cloud where a bunch of free hosted services will let people collaborate inside a PDF document – like making sure everybody’s literally on the same page though there’s no real-time co-editing.

Acrobat.com users can store and share files, gather comments, access Adobe’s web-based word processor, Buzzword, and use Adobe’s ConnectNow web conferencing service (limit: four people).

TechCrunch quips that it’s taking on Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live Wokspace, WebEx and GoToMeeting all at the same time.

Acrobat 9 will initially be limited to English, French, German and Japanese. Acrobat.com is in English.

Creative Suite is supposed to range from $1,199-$2,499, with upgrades from CS3 at $159.