WebDAV has come up as one way of supporting the collaboration features in Acrobat 5. It seems WebDAV would also work with other software. This is more likely as Acrobat is not cheap if everybody in a workgroup needs a full copy, as is the case for the collaboration features to be available.

WebDAV stands for web Distributed Authoring and Versioning. It allows people with a browser to alter the available web page. The versioning keeps track of how the page should have been at a particular time.

Acrobat has always had features for adding notes, underlining important bits of text, adding a web link etc. With Acrobat 5 it is possible for this to happen online. WebDAV seems to be a leading way to do this though there are others.

PlanetPDF has an article about this and an article from a Seybold Report. There was an example online PDF but so much was added to it that it seems to have fallen over.

Here are a couple of graphics borrowed from the PlanetPDF site.

Will Pollard itc@geo2.poptel.org.uk