Raymond Yee, April 9th, 2008 Comments(1)

Adobe has updated Share, their service for document sharing and management, so that users can now convert uploaded documents into PDF and they also have exposed this functionality in the Share API. This is a useful enhancement that should broaden the utility of the service (we previously looked at the Adobe Share API in our coverage of 10 Online Storage APIs).

The first Share mashup in our listings is Handout, an app which lets you upload documents to Share and then post them quickly to Pownce or Twitter.

A good way to learn about the Share API is to first sign up to use the online service: Go to the SHARE login page to either login or setup an account. Upload a file and hit the “Convert to PDF” button. According to the document Adobe Document Center:Supported file formats for shared files, you can upload the following document types:

Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 formats, Rich Text Format (RTF), Open Office formats, text, and PDF.
HTML
Adobe supported image formats: GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG
Creative Suite file formats
SWF and Captivate formats
ZIP

To get started with the API, take the following steps:

check out the overview documentation
sign up for an API key
read the documentation in HTML or in pdf (which lets you see the Share interface in action)
see whether one of the API wrappers (including ActionScript, Java, Ruby, Python, and ColdFusion) suits your needs.

Note the upcoming name change for the service: “In the future, the ‘Share API’ will be named the ‘Document Services API.’”