Buzzword Loses Some of Its Charm

Need an upside to this fiscal meltdown? Smaller businesses now have the perfect excuse to move their operations, or at least some of them, online.

Web-based office automation packages are cheap. They work. And considering the almost ridiculous range of choices -- everybody from Google(GOOG Quote) to Sun Microsystems(JAVA Quote) to Zoho.com offer powerful ways to enter and edit text -- small enterprises looking to save money as the economy slows simply have no choice but to at least try a few.

Earlier this year, graphic software powerhouse Adobe Systems (ADBE Quote) entered the online word-processing fray with its own online word tool called Buzzword. I reviewed the package then -- favorably, I might add -- and decided to bring the software into the heart of my own digital content creation business.

For the last six months or so we have edited dozens of stories and blog items per week with Buzzword. In that time, Adobe has made a series of quiet, but important, upgrades. And our daily use of the product has revealed some interesting issues that have made me rethink my earlier enthusiasm for this product.

Here is what we've learned.

What You Get

Make no mistake: Buzzword is the word-processing, document-handling real deal. For absolutely no upfront cost, you get a fully functional, easy-to-use word processor that edits, stores, marks up and files your documents. And with a hefty 5 GB of storage per account, assuming you do mostly text and light graphics, as long as you arrange for a back storage solution, say, every few months, there is essentially no limits in what you can store.

Buzzword is no homemade, cheapie product. It has the entire design and business muscle of Adobe behind it. So it's not going anywhere. And the design and user interface for this software is off the hook: Elegant fonts, excellent graphics tools and slick spellcheckers are my favorites among many rich layout and design features.

Listen up, digital content creators: Buzzword has a terrific export option that enables dead-on, clean extraction of text and graphics. Got a hungry blog to feed? Buzzword's export-to-text feature has literally never coughed up even a bad spacing in our testing. Just try working that miracle using Microsoft(MSFT Quote) Word or Google Apps.