Adobe today announced a major update to their Acrobat product to the next version Adobe Acrobat 9.0, currently in beta the final version of the product is scheduled to be released next month, with exciting new features like embedding of third-party applications like flash, video, slides and even maps. One the most exciting new feature is support for embedded forms allowing PDF creators to track and collect data from the users.

The Acrobat 9 range consists of Acrobat 9 Standard, Acrobat 9 Pro, and Acrobat 9 Pro Extended flavours of the software, The most feature-rich of all Acrobat 9 Pro Extended also includes Adobe Presenter software for easy conversion of Microsoft PowerPoint presentations into multimedia objects which can be embedded and can be published as PDF files, the expensive version (expected to be $699) will also support mapping features with geospatial coordinates and enable users to mark locations and measure distances.

Adobe also launched their new collaboration portal Acrobat.com, a set of tightly integrated online tools to create, publish and share PDF files, with 1 GB free online storage space and advanced functionalities like online forms with full data analysis and database like control, the portal already seem to be a hit.