Yesterday, Adobe (News - Alert) acquired Behance, a privately-held online platform for creative professionals to display their portfolios. This acquisition is a way for Adobe to bring community features to its Creative Cloud platform, a subscription-based service aimed at professionals that offer access to Adobe's creative tools and services, as well as the ability to publish and share work across multiple devices.

Indeed, Adobe's plans for Creative Cloud have always focused on the sharing of work, enabling collaboration. With Behance's one million members, it seems Adobe has this goal within reach, as well as the community to make it worthwhile.

"When we launched Creative Cloud earlier this year, we committed that we would give members new value on an ongoing basis," said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager of Adobe, in a statement. "Behance will play a key role in Adobe's efforts to serve the creative world in the years to come and will accelerate our efforts to enable a more open and collaborative creative community."

Adobe plans to integrate Behance into its Web tools, and eventually its desktop tools as well — think along the lines of allowing users to publish their portfolios directly from Illustrator, InDesign or Dreamweaver. However, Behance as it exists currently won't go away, at least not any time soon.

Behance's office is to remain in Manhattan, while the company's CEO Scott Belsky is joining Adobe as vice president of Community.

The only decision that hasn't been made is how to handle Behance's ProSite feature, which offers greater functionality for a monthly fee. It has more or less been confirmed that it will be integrated with Creative Cloud, but this may change going forward. Free accounts, meanwhile, will remain unaffected.

And so it seems Adobe will end the year the way it began: with an acquisition. In January, the company completed its acquisition of Efficient Frontier, a company that optimized multichannel and auction-based digital advertising across search, display and social media.

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