January 2009 Archives

As many of you know Connect Pro is a Flash based application, and runs in any browser that supports Flash Player 8 or higher. I thought it would be fun to show you a short video showing Connect Pro running on the Playstation 3, which actually runs a version of Flash Player 9, it works really well, almost everything that is supported via a desktop based browser also works as expected on the Playstation. However the folks at Sony don't appear to have enabled support for audio / video device capture so you can't use the Connect Pro VoIP or Camera capabilities, but you can see other people via video and hear them via VoIP.

The quality of the video I captured isn't the best, if anyone has some advice regarding better ways to capture screen recordings from the Playstation then please let me know.

I asked my son Tom to demonstrate the whiteboard and camera features by Connecting from another computer, as you can see Connect Pro is so straight forward to use even my five year old knows how to use it! :)

If you are a CIO or a manager of an IT department for a large or small organization, Unified Communications (UC) is quickly moving towards the top of your agenda. A recent study from CDW quoted by Gary Kim on TMCnet shows that 39% of organizations surveyed are approaching UC from a rich media conferencing angle. I recently wrote a white paper that explains how Connect Pro can help organizations succeed with that approach to UC. Click here to download the white paper. Continue reading for a quick summary.

It’s been a great year for 3rd party acknowledgement of what we’ve accomplished with Connect Pro, with another outstanding analyst review. InfoTech Research Group recently published “Vendor Landscape: Web Conferencing; Show Me, Don’t Just Tell Me” on December 17th giving Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro top honors in all four evaluation categories (see page 6 to see for yourself).

Connect Pro was singled out as an optimal choice for eLearning applications, conferencing needs which center around business document collaboration, and sales & marketing presentations and demos. ConnectNow, our entry-level solution, was also highlighted for novice users.

This is on the heels of similar honors from Gartner Research putting Connect Pro in the “Leaders” quadrant for the second year in a row, the Software & Information Industry Association's 2008 CODIE Award for Best Collaboration Solution, PC Magazine’s Editor’s 2008 Choice award for web conferencing, and Training Media Review’s recent 4-star assessment, all in 2008!

On this day of historic inaugurations, you may have missed that Adobe announced the inaugural version of the Adobe eLearning Suite today (as well as the Technical Communication Suite 2). The eLearning Suite combines the best of Adobe's eLearning authoring tools including a completely new version of Captivate, version 4), Presenter 7, Soundbooth CS4, and extended products such as a version of Flash Professional CS4 with Flash Quiz Interactions and Dreamweaver CS4 with Course Builder Extensions.

We've put together an FAQ on ConnectUsers.com to help Connect Pro customers learn more about the eLearning Suite.

For all you Connect Pro users out there, there are some upcoming user group meetings scheduled that you might want to attend. You can find out more about the events by clicking the links. Make sure you register for the events if you want to get reminders, access info, etc.

I'm sure you've heard those of us in the industry touting how web conferencing will ultimately help your bottom line (and help the environment) by reducing travel. But internally at Adobe, we are constantly auditing ourselves to see if we are truly delivering on this promise.

This is a reminder that we will be holding our next meeting of the free, online Connect Pro Best Practices User Group tomorrow, Tuesday, January 6th at 3 PM Eastern/12 PM Pacific.

In this meeting, Peter Ryce, Connect Pro Evangelist, will be presenting on Video Best Practices in Connect Pro.

For details on how to participate visit: http://www.connectusers.com/groups/bestpractices/events/277/

If you cannot attend live, a recording will be made available on our User Group homepage:
http://www.connectusers.com/groups/bestpractices/