In an e-mail Tuesday, Zeller stressed that the project is still in an early phase and he could not immediately provide a full interview.

He did reveal that the initial idea for Genesis arose from discussions with Business Objects, with which Adobe formed a partnership last year.

Adobe will make money on Genesis by charging a subscription fee to users who want to share workspaces, conduct real-time collaboration -- or both -- according to Zeller's e-mail. "There are some more ideas of how to generate revenue, which I can't discuss yet," he added.

One Adobe user had a generally positive reaction to the company's plans.

Bob Gourley, former CTO of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, has been using Adobe's Connect and Acrobat.com collaboration offerings for his consulting business. Those tools and the workspaces concept in Genesis collectively generate "a really disruptive capability," he said in an e-mail.

Gourley has questions, however: "I wonder what their price point will be. I also wonder about the governance needs that enterprises like. For example, will it connect with LDAP or Active Directory? Is it PKI-enabled? What auditing capabilities will be enabled?"

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink, largely echoed Gourley. "If there's any company that can do the lightweight enterprise mashup thing credibly, it's Adobe," he wrote in an e-mail. "The challenges they face to their vision are mostly focused around governance and security."

Zeller addressed the security questions in his e-mail.

"The initial version of Genesis will be a hosted service and will include user management. Users can maintain their own contact lists and decide who they share a workspace with (with different levels of usage rights)," he wrote. "There will also be the option of an enterprise hosted service which will allow synch with corporate LDAP and enterprise-specific catalogs and management." In the future, the company will also consider creating an on-premise version, depending on customer feedback, he wrote.