While we're hearing Adobe will be beefing up its own web-conferencing and online document collaboration in Acrobat 9, developer and former Sun consultant John Mohan, CEO of Rosebud PLM is gearing up for the commercial release of his company's own hosted solution to allow real-time document reviews.

Rosebud recently secured venture financing that will help that effort, Mohan says. The company may also soon be accepted into the University of Central Florida's business incubator program, through connections made via one member of Mohan's software development team. That would yield access to lab testing facilities and cheaper rents.

As part of this new push, Rosebud plans to hire several employees and will be opening an office in Orlando in July. If all goes as planned, Rosebud 1.0 will be out by the end of the year.

"Everyone who's worked on the product has worked on a part-time basis--in the basement. In the garage. Not even the garage--we've been lucky to be in the garage," Mohan says. "We're going to staff up and finish this thing in six months."

Hosted by Rosebud's servers, the Acrobat plug-in syncs simultaneous comments and annotations of many participants over the web, be they in adjoining cubicles or in different physical locations.

Because the software works outside the browser and on Java within Acrobat, Rosebud offers several benefits other collaboration packages don't: The nimbleness and precision of Acrobat's nearly infinite zoom and screen redraw, no muddy workflow issues such as "bringing in" document edits from an Acrobat Connect or LiveMeeting session, where the collaborators' thoughts are saved outside of the document under review in a separate file.

In demos with PDFzone, the product has shown to offer faster performance and better productivity potential than many other tools that tout those goals. Most web-conferencing systems share desktops and not documents, where Rosebud puts all users inside a PDF together.

While there is no voice or video support for Rosebud--making it more of a straight-up document collaboration tool and less of a web-conferencing system like Connect and LiveMeeting. It does, however, support chat and notes functions, which gives Rosebud sessions a web-meeting feel. That brings Rosebud closer to web conferencing than Acrobat's on-board document review features, which run independently of Connect and cover some of the same functionality.

Like Connect, Rosebud sets up open sessions on its server where participants can join or leave independently, and add their thoughts to a PDF document. It supports cell phone alerts, which can notify participants via SMS of session activity, as well as round-tripping of documents in and out of Microsoft Office apps.

Unlike Connect, it doesn't yet work on the free Adobe Reader. Rosebud, Mohan says, has not yet come to an agreement with Adobe to extend the plug-in's functionality to Reader, but the company has been negotiating with Adobe on that front.

Rosebud hosting starts at $395/year or $39/month; at present, the service extends only to North America.