Recently in Awards and Reviews Category

Thrilled to see that the U.S. Department of State has been nominated for an award at Adobe's annual MAX user conference! The CO.NX project was named a finalist in the public sector category, which recognizes the most innovative use of technology. The U.S. Department of State developed CO.NX to connect U.S. experts with international audiences to better teach the world about the U.S, its policies, and people.

As a tangential aside, Mark Hamill (AKA Luke Skywalker) will be presenting the award in Los Angeles to the winner on October 6.

Please take a minute and vote for CO.NX here: https://www.adobemaxsubmission.com/viewer/?projectid=121.

Congratulations to the entire CO.NX team!

It's flattering when a customer looks around the web conferencing market and chooses Connect Pro. Even more flattering when 200,000 people do so all at once.

We are thrilled to announce the that US Marine Corp recently selected Connect Pro as their standard across the entire organization to provide deployed troops secure web conferencing and collaboration. The big focus will be to use Connect Pro as a tactical battlefield collaboration tool for deployed troops across locations worldwide, and will used as a part of version 1.5 of the USMC's Tactical Collaboration Work Suite, a portable data center providing robust, highly available, highly scalable collaboration and hosting capabilities to deployed forces.

The Marine Corps cited several factors for adopting Acrobat Connect Pro as its collaboration solution. In addition to meeting stringent standards for security, availability and quality, the solution is Joint Interoperability and Test Command Certified, so troops and military leaders can connect quickly across any Department of Defense network. Also, because Acrobat Connect Pro simply requires that users have Adobe Flash Player, which is already installed on Department of Defense computers and 98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops, it can be deployed in the field for use in extremely low-bandwidth environments and intermittent connectivity.

For a few years now we've been seeing some of the world's most secure organizations in financial services, life sciences, and government -- including the entire U.S. Department of Defense -- turn to Connect Pro as their preferred real-time collaboration solution. This is because Connect Pro not only far exceeds the security capabilities of our competitors, but also enables increased efficiency by removing all the technology barriers found in our competitor's numerous plug-ins, downloads, and system requirements.

Adobe is happy to help the Marine Corps streamline information exchange and keep troops safe in mission-critical deployments.

We're thrilled to announce that Gartner Research has once again placed Acrobat Connect Pro in the "Leaders" quadrant in their 2009 report on web conferencing. Connect Pro was one of 14 products evaluated for the report with rating criteria including product/service, overall viability, customer experience, market understanding, marketing strategy, product strategy and innovation.

Gartner defines a leader as having:

achieved significant market share while demonstrating their ability to respond to customers' needs. Leaders have robust, scalable products with a wide range of features, a large installed base, acceptable financial performance and good distribution. Leaders do well today and are prepared for the future.

Some of the key strengths they cited include our robust support for multimedia, lack of compatibly challenges seen in all of our competitors, our success in security with significant wins in regulated industries, government, and defense, and how our service is optimized for rich media without straining a customer's network.

You can view the full report on our website.

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!

Earlier this week I attended the Masie Learning 2008 conference in Orlando, Florida. Along with just over 1800 other learning professionals across all manner of industries, I did my best to both soak up and contribute to the wealth of knowledge, rich in this community of people passionate about learning. I believe this annual conference is beneficial to the learning professional who resides in the spectrum between the pure HR performance management role, and a technical learning systems or content implementation role.

My own personal takeaways from attendance and participation as a session presenter are these: