Follow my blog post on reducing your carbon footprint using web conferencing I learnt a partner of Adobe's, Refined Data has created an awesome SyncSWF called Footprints. Learn more about it by viewing the Captivate recording I've put together.
Last week Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro was the proud recipient of Training Media Review's Best Product of 2008 designation, which came via a Four Star Review authored by Jan Cornelssen, Manager of Technical Training at Cisco Systems.
Cornelssen comments that Connect Pro is, " The Mercedes Benz of webinar tools" and notes that "[ Acrobat Connect Pro ] is the most robust web training and conferencing tool I've ever seen."
Key excerpts include an overview of the Connect Pro Virtual Classroom interface and a walk through of Connect Pro Training, a system that enables the management of eLearning content and individual learner tracking.
To sum it up, Cornelssen advises, "If your training department needs to define, monitor, and track learning events, this application does it better than anything I have used."
We couldn't agree more!
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
The Connect Pro Event Management application is often overlooked in the Connect family of applications. However it offers some wonderful features that allow it to do things that would be difficult to do otherwise. Event Management is really a way of inviting people or allowing open registration to something (like a webinar), capturing registration data (including answers to your own custom questions), then automatically sending out all the necessary emails such as reminders, updates, and “thank-you”s.
But the event itself doesn’t have to be an online meeting. For example, you may have used an online Connect Pro meeting as a webinar to launch your new product. You could certainly use Event Management to capture all the leads to that live event. But after the webinar you’d like to use the recording of the meeting to capture leads too – Connect Pro Event Management can help. This little tutorial shows you how you can set-up an event to capture leads from on-demand content such as a meeting recording. http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/p59921580/
While we continue to add to our Resource Center, there are a number of other great resources out there for you to help you get the most out of Connect Pro. I always like to learn as much as I can about a product I use, so thought I’d point you to a few resources that will help you do just that.
First, if you haven’t been to our online user community – ConnectUsers.com – I highly encourage you to do so. We launched it in September of 2007. There has been quite a bit of activity on our forums, and there a number of tutorials available for you there. It’s a great place to see how others are using Connect Pro and to gain access to expertise from other users, Connect partners and the Connect Pro team. I also think the Adobe Connect User Group AsiaPac does a great job at highlighting and organizing some key resources and documentation to help you get started and learn best practices.
I am quite impressed by the extensive community site that Penn State University created for their Connect Pro users. No doubt it’s led to great adoption of their program. If you’re trying to help drive adoption at your organization, you might want to consider creating something similar.
YouTube has a number of Connect Pro training videos posted…try searching on “Adobe Connect Pro” or “Acrobat Connect Pro”. My personal favorite isn’t actually a training video, but an interesting use case -- a music group broadcast a performance over Connect Pro. Check it out -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfdu9z9ua0Q
I used to be a certification addict. As a young woman teaching MCSE courses in the late 90’s (when NT4 was new and exciting), I believe this was in fact critical to my job. I set aggressive goals to obtain new credentials once a month, and added them like clockwork, studying most days after a full day of teaching, and ‘volunteering’ to administer the systems at the training company where I worked.
Now that I’ve been in training and elearning for over 10 years, I’ve definitely cooled off on the whole certification thing. Who has time for it? What does it matter when I can refer to my years of actual experience? At this point would it really make any difference to what others think of me?
A recent meeting at CompTIA (www.comptia.org) has brought me full circle to my old driven nature to get another certification fix. I was one of a group of virtual classroom training SMEs who met to discuss the differences and similarities between physical classroom and virtual classroom training, and how one can assess the efficacy of an online instructor with as much objectivity as possible. CompTIA offers the Certified Technical Trainer (CTT+) certification for physical classroom instructors, and plans to roll out a similar certification for virtual classroom trainers in Q3 of 2008. I attribute my change of heart regarding the attractiveness of mid-career certification to two realizations stemming from this two day meeting.
As I started to refamilerise myself with the Connect product family (my previous role at Adobe was heavily focused on LiveCycle, Flex and platform technologies) I came across an awesome case study that I must of missed while I was focused on the LiveCycle business. Peter Ryce, our Connect Evangelist (or Connectionist as he likes to be known as) leads a group of the US Military through a demonstration of how they use Connect in real time operations. This example I found truly inspiring, it one of the best uses of Connect I’ve seen and in addition a fantastic example of the value rich internet applications can bring to an organization.
If you haven’t seen this before I’d encourage you to check it out http://www.adobe.com/government/breezo/connect_product_tour/dod_demo.html
We've been using Connect Pro 7 internally at Adobe for a while, and I've been able to take advantage of some of the great new features.....
Two weeks ago, Adobe had its quarterly employee meeting. Because of our large employee base in San Jose, we hosted the all-hands meeting from a nearby auditorium that seats over 1500 people. We also have multiple other sites and countless remote employees, so Acrobat Connect Pro comes in very handy in order to reach these employees. Webcasting our employee meetings makes obvious sense, but it also comes with some challenges. These quarterly meetings often include live software demos, videos, and multiple presenters, all packed into a 1 1/2 hour production that has an audience of more than 5000 people.
Because we are working at a live event outside of our normal conference rooms, we need to work with the production crew that produces the event to get the camera and audio feeds. In order to broadcast these feeds out through Acrobat Connect, we set up a desktop PC backstage with a video/audio capture card. This works great to capture the live production cameras along with the PA audio. During the employee meetings, there are also many great live demos of up and coming products. To capture these, we simply have the live demo team login into the Acrobat Connect Meeting Room, and then share their desktop before their demo.
Because there are multiple agenda items and presenters, we create separate layouts for each agenda item, so we can stay organized and also follow the flow of the event. This works well, especially when we are switching from a layout that features a flash video to a layout that features a presenter going over some slides. No need to scramble when you can customize all of the layouts ahead of time with their own names and in the order of the agenda. After all the layouts are setup, we upload all the finished slides and converted videos into the content library for easy access.
As for the demos, we used the "screen sharing in prepare mode" trick I wrote about a few entries ago. This helps the event run flawlessly, because the last thing on a live demo presenter's mind is to share the screen over Acrobat Connect when you are in front of more than 1500 people!
In addition to the production of the show, the way the event and meeting room is setup is equally important. Because this is a confidential employee meeting, security over Acrobat Connect is crucial. To address the need for security, we use the event module to invite our remote employees who need to view the event over Acrobat Connect. This way, we won't have to worry about accepting any unregistered guests. If they weren't invited, they won't be let in to the meeting room. It is also very easy to add attendees on the fly using the enterprise manager. All they need is the link and their own personal login, so I don't need to worry about being a gate-keeper, Acrobat Connect Pro does it for me.
With any large event, there are always some surprises involved. This particular meeting had a presenter change at the last minute and a live demo from a remote site. Easy enough. We just changed the name of the new presenter's layout, and changed the title slide and reloaded it into the content library. For the remote demo presenter, we had him login to the meeting room and share his desktop. We had our PC send the VGA signal to the production crew so they could broadcast the Acrobat Connect Meeting to the live audience over the projector screens and used the Full screen toggle for a crisp, live demo experience. The remote demonstration looked great on the big screen in front of more than 1500 people!
A live broadcast of an employee meeting is very valuable, but even more valuable is the archive that we capture. Because we use multiple layouts, the archive can be divided into a table of contents, and easily navigated for later viewing. Also, we can set access permissions for these archives, so employees are required to login to Acrobat Connect Pro in order to view them. If we need to take the archive down at any time, we can just take away all the viewing permissions for that particular piece of content.
In summary, it's easy to broadcast these large events using Acrobat Connect Pro. All you need is a PC with an internet connection and an A/V capture card, some content, and an A/V feed from the PA system or a production crew. Below is a screenshot from our last employee meeting.
RM
A couple of months ago we saw this posting about logging into an Adobe Connect meeting from a Nintendo Wii
http://blogs.adobe.com/acrobatconnect/2007/01/web_conferencing_on_the_wii.html
And here’s a picture I took last year when I was logged into a meeting using my Pocket PC.
http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/meetingppc/
For fun, we’re setting out to see how many devices support the Adobe Connect meeting experience. Since we only need Flash Player to attend a meeting – it’s easy to see why “it just works”. There’s no need for Java or custom applications to be installed. And there aren’t any permissions problems because the Flash Player is pre-installed on so many operating systems that it is already there when you need it.
Last week I was talking to a friend of mine at Sony and asked him to log into my meeting – from his Sony PlayStation 3 – and it worked! Here’s a link to the photo he took while we were whiteboarding on an image. My video camera was live at the time.
http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/connectps3/
Now does anyone have an Xbox to try? ;-)
Acrobat Connect Professional Road Show
Acrobat Connect Professional is coming to a city near you! Don’t miss this opportunity to see the product in-person, ask questions and interact with Adobe Experts. http://www.eventsadobe.com/acro/index.html to see the list of cities and register.
We talk a lot about how important the ubiquity of the Adobe Flash Player is for removing the technical barriers that are introduced with many other web conferencing solutions. That ubiquity was taken a step further when one of our users discovered that Adobe Acrobat Connect runs on the popular Nintendo Wii game-console. I have to believe that's an industry-first!
To see some screenshots of it in action, follow this link to
Nathan Strutz's blog.
Kurt Foss has written a great article talking about the Acrobat User Community adopting Acrobat Connect as a tool to enable greater participation in group meetings. This is a great example of the power of using collaboration tools to bring together a geographically-disperse set of users.
Here is a link to the article
Here's an excerpt from the article:
Boston chapter leader Hanyaloglu agrees. "The primary benefit is that group members can very easily participate in these meetings without having to be concerned about leaving the comfort of their offices or homes. It also allows me to be able to bring in speakers from anywhere without worrying about them having to travel. In the near future, I'll be able to hold meetings more frequently, and record them for others to see at a later date.”
Acrobat Connect went live recently, and if you haven't had the opportunity, I highly recommend you take it for a spin. You can learn more about the service and sign-up for a free trial (through the end of the year) by going to:
http://www.adobe.com/products/connect/
There are countless ways in which you can benefit from this service, but here are a few of the ways in which I use the service every day:
Finally, given that tomorrow is a national holiday, I'll let you in on another use-case: it's a great way to interact with your family if you can't make it home for the big day. While we haven't yet completed development on the "turkey-aroma" pod, you can certainly use Acrobat Connect to see your family or friends, and wish them well. One important warning for all of you tech-folks who are looked upon to provide free family IT support: don't tell them about the "remote control" feature or you'll be getting a lot more calls for support (trust me on this one...).