July 2008 Archives

What better way to spend a crisp November day, then in San Jose California with your eLearning friends from Adobe! We’re in the process of finalizing our program for the 2nd Annual Adobe Learning Summit and it promises to be a stellar event packed with sessions to help you create a world class eLearning program at your organization. The Summit will take place on November 10, 2008 at the San Jose Fairmont, with a cocktail reception to follow at Adobe headquarters.

Adobe product team experts, including our very own Connectionist Peter Ryce, will present Adobe enabled strategies, tactics and tools to help you optimize your existing eLearning program or create one from the ground up. We’ll also have a number of our current customers such as Borders, Pfizer and Phillips Medical to share their experiences with creating, deploying and managing successful eLearning programs with Adobe tools.

Here is what one attendee had to say about last year’s Summit:

Most everything exceeded expectations. Overall, GREAT sessions, GREATER facilitators and the GREATEST and most knowledgeable group of Adobe experts...all in one place! It was terrific and I enjoyed meeting everyone.
Mark Handel, Senior Training Design Specialist, Staples

Finally, the Adobe Learning Summit will be co-located with the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn 2008 conference, so it’s easy to attend both.

For more information on the program and registration go to www.adobe.com/go/als.

Over the past several months the global oil costs have increased day by day. Finally we are starting to see the price soften as the our behavior changes to adjust the radical travel cost shifts we have seen over the past few months. Personally it certainly impacted my choice for my daily commuting choice when relocating to the bay area recently and also our choice of vehicle rather than our previous family friendly yet carbon overloaded SUV although I wasn't quite ready to go hybrid just yet, I suspect next time around we might.

I remember back in October last year hearing Gartner's top strategic IT issues for 2008 I was not completely convinced that the Green IT theme was prime time, now I'm thinking how wrong I was.

Air travel costs are spiraling upwards, my partner recently bought a ticket for $300 to go to England, the tax was $800, $600 of the tax were actually hidden fuel surcharges. Many think the airline industry will never be the same again

Recently The Economist released an interesting report into managing your companys carbon footprint. In this report web conferencing was seen as the most popular way of carbon footprint reduction partly because the impact is so easy to measure (mental note to self, we should produce a syncswf to illustrate this) Further more we collectively have the opportunity for major improvements as 59% of organisations said almost no one works from home on a regular basis. Despite the enthusiasm for web conferencing companies appeared reluctant to mandate use of these technologies with 9% of organisations surveyed prepared to take that line with external meetings, this increased to 22% when related to internal meetings, however this figure rose to 46% when voluntary targets were proposed.

I plan to learn and share more of this area of using web conferencing to help reduce your personal and professional carbon footprint in the mean time I encourage everyone to play there part and help save the world one meeting at a time.

By now those of you following this blog are likely already active users of ConnectUsers.com. If not, go now and sign up at http://www.adobe.com/resources/acrobatconnect/. This is a great place to connect with other users in your area, or working on the same kinds of web conferencing and online training projects that you are, as well as to find more information and resources to make you a power user of Connect Pro.

You may not know that we are also working to enrich and udpate the information we offer on adobe.com, at the Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Resource Center. http://www.adobe.com/resources/acrobatconnect/.

Quick Start Guide: don't be fooled by the inconspicuous link to the Quick Start Guide. This is a little page with 11 demonstrations on some of the more common things you might want to do in your meeting, like encourage student participation in a virtual class, use breakout rooms for the first time, or customize your meeting room.

The other resources are divided by role - such as Administrator, Meeting Host, or Training Manager - and are updated on a monthly basis at minimum. Detailed presentations and demonstrations will really enhance your knowledge of managing and using all aspects of Connect Pro as well as Adobe Presenter.

Set aside some time once a month to take a look at what's new on the resource center. If you would really like to see something added, let us know here or on connectusers.com.

Randah