ConnectNow

Just a quick post - Acrobat.com Ideas has a new look. It's been updated to match the new look and feel of Acrobat.com itself. The Ideas site is brighter, easy to skim, with quick ways to vote and to add your comments to other user's ideas. To make things even easier, you can use your Facebook, Twitter or gmail account to sign in.

Your ideas, comments and votes matter to us. More than 35 ideas from Acrobat.com Ideas were included in the November release - and we want to hear more from you.

If you haven't been to the Ideas site for a while, come on back. Let us know what you'd like in future versions of Acrobat.com, Buzzword, ConnectNow and more!

It's been 2 years since the Virtual Ubiquity team joined Adobe and Acrobat.com. And we're marking the anniversary with our most ambitious release to date. Adobe veterans and the former Virtual Ubiquity team have brought their technologies together to merge our online services into a much more cohesive whole. And we think you'll be pleased with the result. We're bringing it all together.

Continue reading "Unity - Bringing it all together" »

You may have seen some early press about our new Acrobat.com release. The team will be taking down Buzzword, Presentations and Tables at 6:00 PM Eastern time today (Friday, 11/20/09.) Share and CreatePDF will go offline at 8:00 PM Eastern time. ConnectNow will be up and running throughout the update window. All of the services will be up and running again by 11:00 PM Eastern time and open for business.

The new look and changes in Acrobat.com are starting to get some good reviews. We invite you to come and check it out later today.

It's not that we are smarter or more creative. It's not because we like each other more. It's because we've found a new way to work.

We get more work done, much better than your team, in much less time, because we use Acrobat.com.

And from a personal standpoint, by working this way I get fewer emails and spend less time in meetings, yet I get more done, have more time to think, and enjoy my work and my co-workers more. How does that sound to you?

Let me give you a real world example of how this happens.

Continue reading "Why our team can beat your team" »

I was one of those 6th grade nerds in the AV corps. We were the guys who got to run the projectors or show the filmstrips. We'd wheel the equipment around the school and feel quite important because we knew stuff the teachers didn't - like how to thread a 16mm projector or splice a film. But there was always a projector bulb or a fuse blown that would sabotage our efforts. And it seems like even today, even with our technology advances, there's always a glitch that gets in the way of our best-laid plans.

Continue reading "ConnectNow to the Rescue!" »

NEW FEATURES IN CONNECTNOW

We receive a lot of good suggestions for new features from our users on a daily basis through our ideas web site & our forum, and it's always very exciting when we get a chance to implement one of those ideas.

This week, we released a new version of ConnectNow and we were able to make the following two new features available to all of you:

Application / Window Screen Sharing
Requests for this feature from our users: Link to the idea on our ideas site & Link 1, Link2, Link3, Link4 on our forum.

Continue reading "Feedback Matters: New Features in ConnectNow" »

From wikipedia:
"The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations ... is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group."

The Acrobat.com Ideas site (http://ideas.acrobat.com) is available now for YOUR ideas, your comments and, very importantly, your VOTES. This is an experiment for us: a new way of gathering ideas, getting feedback on the ideas, and letting you tell us which are the ideas most important to you. Will this be effective? Inspirational? Yes. Absolutely. Please help us explore by adding your ideas. And vote early and often.

Continue reading "The Wisdom of Crowds" »

Screen sharing is one of the most, if not the most, important features of online meetings and something we continue to improve upon. We are excited to share with you the following ConnectNow screen sharing enhancements we've made based on your feedback.

Faster Screen Sharing. Some of you told us you were experiencing screen sharing delays when sharing with lower bandwidth or slow Internet connections. To improve the performance of screen sharing in these circumstances, we tuned our screen sharing algorithm so it transmits data more efficiently. The first time you enter your meeting room you will be asked to download the new add-in with improved screen sharing. You now have the option to optimize screen sharing for faster performance or for higher quality, with the default set to faster performance. You can change your screen sharing setting to higher quality by going to the meeting menu, selecting preferences, then screen share, then enable "high fidelity".

Continue reading "Faster, Better Screen Sharing - ConnectNow!" »

With the arrival of Adobe Creative Suite 4, there has been a lot of buzz in the press about Adobe services generally, and no small number of references to ConnectNow. CS4 applications now have a menu item inviting users to connect - now! - online with remote collaborators.

This is understandably an exciting prospect for creative professionals, who often work collaboratively with a few others who aren't always in the same location. So the convenience and immediacy of screen sharing an Illustrator graphic, an InDesign layout, a Photoshop image is obvious.

Continue reading "Connect - Now!" »

We're pleased to report that the newly announced Creative Suite will add collaboration capabilities offered by Acrobat.com.

Creative professionals will be able to work with others in real time using ConnectNow without leaving the Creative Suite 4 workspace and with no need for IT support or a company-wide web conferencing solution.

You can now access your ConnectNow meeting room directly from within CS4 applications to meet live over the web to share your screen, present creative concepts and ideas, and brainstorm with up to two online guests for no additional service charge. To share your screen with colleagues and clients from within most Creative Suite 4 products, choose File > Share My Screen. Guests can then see your desktop on their screens as you work. You can exchange ideas using the chat pod, add a live video or audio feed, or use the Whiteboard feature to enable guests to comment on content. You can even temporarily hand over control of the screen to a guest to collaborate on a file.

As an added convenience, Acrobat.com on Adobe AIR will be included with most of the Creative Suites, so you can launch ConnectNow from your desktop and use other Acrobat.com services including convenient file upload, storage and sharing of large files.

Have you tried the remote control feature in ConnectNow yet? This useful functionality enables you to control another computer from your own desktop. You can be sitting at your desk in Chicago, logged in to your ConnectNow meeting room with your colleague from Tokyo, and, with permission, take control of your colleague’s computer.

Here’s a real example. I have a friend named David who works at a startup software company. OK, he IS the company: chief software architect, QA manager, documentation writer, and technical support engineer. David has created a good piece of software for retail businesses and he takes pride in being available to his customers around the clock for technical support. The problem is, his phone does ring and he spends too much time trying to walk people through troubleshooting procedures. I told him there is a better way.

Continue reading "Take control (of another user’s screen, that is!)" »

The second Acrobat.com podcast again features a discussion with David Coletta, and includes the following topics:

Buzzword design process
• Feedback email as source for new features
• Visual design and functional specifications
• Designer-developer interaction: how to interpret static designs
• The value of a good spec
• Buzzword excellent for writing specs

New feature discussion
• Focus on reducing speed bumps, improving the invitation process
• New language dictionaries

Vignette about ConnectNow:
• Remote tech support

You can listen to or download the MP3 file here.

We've also added the ability to subscribe to the podcasts, either by your RSS feed reader or iTunes.

Yesterday Karen Tomlinson, our ConnectNow product manager, wrote an excellent post on the functionality and value of our new web conferencing application.

Today, Karen followed up by delivering our weekly seminar - again, focused on ConnectNow. For those interested who couldn't make it, we recorded the session using ConnectPro. You can view the seminar by going to the recorded session here. It's 43 minutes long, and definitely worth the time. Everyone who has seen ConnectNow in action has been really impressed; Karen's session will show you what everyone's been so excited about.

We're holding these seminars weekly all summer, every Tuesday at 11:30 EDT, 8:30 PDT. Next week, we'll be focusing on a more technical subject: Fang Chang, product manager for our developer tools and document APIs, will provide an in-depth view at the ways that developers can make use of our platform to build rich collaboration capabilities into their own applications.

For more information on the seminars, including the schedule and the logisitics for these seminars, follow this link to the posting on our forum.

Today's Workplace Challenges
These days it's becoming much more common for people to work with other people who aren't in the same location. There are many challenges that come with this. You no longer have the luxury of walking over to someone's office or cube and having a face-to-face conversation. You no longer have team meetings in the same room where you can gauge people's reactions to what you are saying, see if they are following along, or brainstorm new ideas on a white board. You can't help feeling one step removed from the people you are meeting with when all you hear is their voice and try to follow along with what people are talking about.

So what can you do to improve the quality of your day-to-day interactions and meetings? That's where using web conferencing comes in. It can dramatically improve your meetings and ad hoc collaboration by providing a visual representation of what you are talking about, bring the physical presence of the people to the meeting with web cams, and provide a place to capture meeting notes, share files and brainstorm ideas. With ConnectNow, web conferencing is now accessible to anyone. It's free, sign up now!

For a hands-on look at ConnectNow, join me tomorrow for a live seminar at 11:30 EDT, 8:30 PDT. See our forum for session details.

Here are a few ideas on how you can make the most of your real-time collaboration sessions using ConnectNow.

Continue reading "Effective Real-Time Collaboration in Today's Workplace Using ConnectNow" »

If you've been following the Acrobat.com press, or reading our marketing materials, or checking our blog and forum, you've seen that we are very focused on enabling collaboration - especially when documents are involved. Here's a quick look at the ways we enable collaboration.

Collaboration in Authoring
The story begins with document authoring, and in Buzzword we've heard countless people indicate that Buzzword is the finest online writing experience currently available. Many have told us they've even abandoned Word - some use the expression "liberated" - in favor of Buzzword as their primary writing environment.

Buzzword is indeed a simple and elegant word processor, but it really differentiates from Word and other desktop applications when you want to collaborate with others in the writing process. Instead of pushing documents out to others via email, you simply invite your collaborators to the only instance of the document, online, where they can contribute content or just add comments.

With everyone working on the same document, rather than multiple, disparate copies of the document, then collaboration is smoother and you can keep track of everyone's involvement. The image below shows the Buzzword collaborator bar, which displays who has read the document, when they read it and which version they read. Now that's getting everyone on the same page!

Continue reading "Document Collaboration" »