Both Adobe and Microsoft today announced free web-based solutions for document sharing. Adobe Share uses the Flash technology to display various document formats. Tim O’Reilly has a nice writeup of the new service.

Microsoft Office Live Workspace allows the sharing of Microsoft Office documents. Just as with Adobe Share, and in contrast to Google Docs, you can’t directly edit documents online.

Why should a scientist care about all this? Because these are excellent tools to share your presentations and to collaborate on manuscripts you are writing. No more emailing Powerpoint, Excel, Word or PDF files back and forth. And with several major players (Microsoft, Google, Adobe and the smaller Zoho) offering web-based document sharing, this will soon become as commonplace as web-based email.

In related news, Adobe today also announced the acquisition of Buzzword, the online word processor that I wrote about last week.