Adobe Connect Blog

There are two two separate pods in Adobe Connect that enable participants to ask questions during a meeting, virtual classroom or webinar.

The Chat pod allows for completely open discussion among all participants and private discussion between two participants or a participant and a group (like the presenters). The Chat pod is unmoderated, which means anyone can post a question or comment and it will be seen immediately by everyone. Private chat appears in a separate tab in the chat pod.

The Q&A pod is similar in that anyone can post a question or comment to the pod, but unlike the chat pod, those posts are only seen by the presenters and hosts in a meeting. A presenter or host can choose to answer a question in the Q&A pod either publicly (in which case everyone will see the question and the answer) or privately (in which case only the questioner will see the question and answer). Questions from the Q&A pod can be assigned to a specific presenter.

So which pod should you use? Should you moderate your discussion or not? The answer of course depends on your web conference. As the host of a meeting, I usually ask myself a few questions when making this decision.

•  Is the goal to enable participants to ask me questions – or am I looking to facilitate a conversation between participants?
• How do I feel about participants chatting privately? Will this be a distraction to the meeting or will it increase engagement?
• Are there questions I might not be comfortable answering in public?
• How many participants are attending? What kind of meeting is it?

In general, I prefer to use an open, un-moderated chat pod. I find it can increase interaction among all participants. The un-moderated chat pod is ideal for collaborative meetings and often works well for virtual classrooms.

I believe it’s important not only use meeting size as the only factor – but as a meeting grows, it makes sense to swap out the un-moderated chat pod for a moderated Q&A pod. At this point, it also helps to have someone else in the meeting helping to moderate the Q&A pod while you speak. The Q&A pod is ideal for webinars.

Of course, you can have the best of both worlds. I’ll often use an open chat pod in my webinar lobby that participants can use while they’re waiting for a webinar to begin, then switch to a moderated Q&A pod during the webinar itself.

Tips & Tricks

• Encourage users to change the color of their text when using the chat pod. It helps to differentiate the questions and makes everything more readable.
• The presenter view of the Q&A pod can be sent to the Presenter Only Area (POA). This enables the presenters to work with a much larger pod while they are facilitating the questions.
• You can add multiple chat pods to a single layout. This is helpful when you want to solicit feedback across a number of different topics. Simply double-click the title of a chat pod to rename it.
• You can export a Q&A log of all of the questions that were asked as a rich text file. You can also email the content of any Q&A or chat pod. Click the pod options menu to access these options.
• You can use an un-moderated chat pod and still disable private chat. This can be quickly disabled in the Preferences dialog.

Big name universities. Big research. Big data. Big brains. Big collaboration?

I had the honor to attend the Internet2 conference in the nation’s capital last week. I was there to help announce the new Adobe Connect Managed Services offering that will be available soon as an Internet2 NET+ service (www.internet2.edu/netplus). We on the Adobe Connect team are thrilled to be a part of this community and the great achievements its members will undoubtedly produce.

At its most basic, Internet2 provides a high speed, private network to its members. But that doesn’t even begin to explain the capabilities of this network, the security and reliability its members will enjoy, and the power of bringing together communities that are some of the most brilliant researchers, scientists, and scholars on our globe. The founders of this initiative say it better than Ido, so take a look at the introduction to the Internet2 networking consortium on their web site: www.internet2.edu.

Think Hadron Collider today. Think the cure for cancer tomorrow. Never before had it occurred to me to stop to consider the amount of computation, throughput, and storage power that would be required to support such complex initiatives. Until now, realtime collaboration at such a scale was next to impossible. The security restrictions alone could make collaboration challenging at best. With membership in Internet2, research, education, and industry institutions have access to some of the fastest, most secure networks on the globe. Using Internet2 Net+ services to collaborate – including Adobe Connect meetings and virtual classrooms – members can share private and secure virtual lab space, classrooms, project rooms, and more.

With boundaries removed, teamwork and knowledge sharing will only increase. We can’t begin to imagine what the big-brained, big data, Internet2 community will achieve next over ‘big collaboration’.

by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect 

Two weeks ago, I attended the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco.    It was a very interesting event that touched upon a lot of subjects from how to set-up sales compensation, to boosting sales rep motivation, to what CRM, lead management, analytics system companies should consider implementing.

What stroke me though was how prevalent virtual meetings and webinars have become for sales and marketing organizations to engage with their prospective customers.  Webconferencing has become mission critical to ensure sales rep can talk to prospects, to ensure marketing organization can generate leads via webinars.

Yet many organizations struggle to engage customers virtually.  Their presentation are very bland consisting mostly of voice over screen share and quickly lose the audience to multi-tasking and going back to checking email.

I was particularly interested by a presentation by Carmen Taran from Rexi Media called “Virtual Presentations Can Make or Break You”.  Carmen provided some tips on how to re-engage your audience every 2 minutes – as studies have found this is the most attention span you get from people these days.  Here is what she advocates:

1) vary the type of content frequently: don’t just present slides that follows the same format.  Vary template, add demo, video, simulation, quizzes, games.

2) use intriguing pictures instead of  words to capture the audience attention and force them to listen for the solution of the riddle set in the picture.

3) create emotional connection with the audience, though story or picture.

Adobe Connect offer unsurpassed rich experience to create this emotional engagement with an audience and I was not surprised to see Adobe Connect screen shots in Carmen’s presentation.   We also have a lot of best practices for engaging audience at our community site, www.connectusers.com.

I was pleased this morning to see a tweet from the CODiE Awards (@CODiEAwards) congratulating Adobe Connect (@AdobeConnect) on becoming a finalist in the Best Collaboration/Social Networking Solution category for the CODiE Awards.

Congrats @AdobeConnect – 2012 #SIIA CODiE Awards finalist in Best Collaboration/Social Networking Solution #CODiE12 #AATC

— CODiE Awards (@CODiEAwards) April 11, 2012

I spend a large part of my day in Adobe Connect meetings conducting business with the rest of my team and colleagues in regions all around the world, so it was particularly gratifying to see web conferencing technology recognized for the efficiencies it brings to collaboration.

In fact, Adobe Connect has been getting quite a bit of recognition from the industry lately. The product was recently honored as part of the Brandon Hall Excellence in Technology Awards in the Technology for Virtual Classroom Training or Conferencing category.

We were also included on a list of the top applications for the Mac by PC Magazine. And PC Magazine has recognized the product in the past, as well, with its Editors Choice rating for Adobe Connect 8.

We’re continuing to innovate and look forward to sharing more with you as we go…as always, please stay tuned and in touch.

by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect Business Unit

In 2011, Adobe Connect reached a remarkable milestone.  We delivered more than 3 billion minutes on our hosted platform.  This number would be even bigger if we could add the usage numbers from our large on-premise user base.

This is no surprise.  Year after year, we have observed that organizations that deploy Adobe Connect experience exponential usage growth compared to any previous solution that they have deployed before.  Most credit the ease of use, the persistence of the meeting room which allows for synchronous / a-synchronous collaboration and the development of remote learning, triggered by all the learner engagement features provided by Adobe Connect.

In addition, we have seen a rapid adoption of our mobile application on iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod), Android or QNX (Blackberry Playbook).  In 2011, accesses from mobile devices are more than double accesses from Linux or Unix based platform and quickly progressing.

We are set to continue this growth trend in 2012 with exciting upcoming new releases, Adobe Connect 9 and new versions of our mobile applications to further enable tablet to tablet collaboration.

Last week, more than 69,000 people pledged to telework as a part of “Telework Week 2012”. The result: More than $5.5 million saved and 3,358 tons of pollutants removed from the air. It’s no argument the positive impact that teleworking has on the environment, but what about the impact on individuals and companies?

Studies show that employees who work remotely feel a better sense of personal freedom, flexibility and work-life balance. The option to work from home is also a big draw for job seekers. For companies, telecommuting expands the talent pool, reduces the spread of illness, reduces costs, and increases productivity.

With the right tools and technologies, the benefits of teleworking seem limitless. Advancements in Web conferencing solutions like Adobe Connect have made it easier for globally dispersed teams to communicate effectively. Trainings, workshops and classes can easily be given and taken online, and organizations can effortlessly deliver presentations to employees, customers and partners – no matter where they are in the world. In addition to Web conferencing; social networking, IM and traditional e-mail continue to be the preferred forms of communication for teleworkers.

Bottom line: remote employees can just as easily, if not better, collaborate, complete work faster, and drive better results.

Next week, we’ll be examining specific tips and tricks on how to make the most out of working remotely. Are you a teleworker? If so, what benefits and drawbacks do you experience? If you do not work remotely, would you consider participating in Telework Week next year?

by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect Business Unit

Yesterday, Apple launched the new iPad.  Yet another technical marvel from the Cupertino firm.  What I found the most interesting is from the launch presentation was some of the numbers Tim Cook unveiled.  One statistics in particular: 15.4 million iPads sold last quarter, which is more than the number of PCs sold by any single PC maker in that quarter.

It is clear that Tablet are fast becoming the computing device of choice of many knowledge workers.  Yet until now, most web conferencing vendors assumed that people would use tablet just to consume meeting from their device.  Not to run meetings.  With the increasing adoption of tablets, it is clear that customers will expect to do tablet to tablet collaboration.

As a result, when assessing web conferencing solutions, decision makers should consider not only whether you can attend a meeting, a webinar or a virtual classroom from a tablet, but most importantly, can you host a meeting from a tablet and collaborate tablet to tablet.

If your webconferencing solution supports only screen sharing, it is not going to work on tablet.  No tablet operating system supports screen sharing today and it is not clear that it is in the roadmap of any.  Most importantly, the overall user experience of multi-tasking on the tablet does note lend itself well to screen sharing.  As a result it is clear that most collaboration will happen on up-loaded documents.

Uploading documents into a meeting space is not straightforward.  Many solutions convert your powerpoint file into a viewable format by running processes locally on your desktop (often calling Microsoft Powerpoint executables).  This mode of conversion is no longer available on the tablet, so the conversion needs to happen in the cloud.

If you are evaluating a web conferencing vendor an plan to use the solution for table to tablet collaboration, you should make sure that:

1) they offer other sharing options than screen sharing and

2) that their document conversion upload is server based (and does not occur locally).

Adobe Connect supports screen sharing and document upload for multiple format.  All our conversion is server based and does not require mandatory client side conversion.

Our Adobe Connect Mobile 1.7 application enable not only to attend meetings, but also virtual classrooms or seminars.  It enables user also to host a classroom, a meeting or a webinar.  Our mobile 2.0 currently in beta will enable you to do much more and provide a great tablet to tablet meeting experience.

Can not wait to run my next Adobe Connect meeting on the new iPad !

Enterprise and government IT departments are standardizing on Adobe Connect web conferencing – not surprising given the ease-of-integration, mobile capabilities, extensibility, security features, and a range of deployment options.

We’ve put together a short video that does a great job of speaking to the considerations of IT by highlighting some of the benefits and capabilities, and featuring a few customers who are realizing success with the solution.

Keep an eye on this blog, and follow us on Twitter (@AdobeConnect) – we’ll continue to share stories, tips, news, and discuss a range of web-conferencing topics.

Defense Connect Online (DCO), the Adobe Connect and XMPP chat deployment at the US Department of Defense run by the Defense System Information Agency (DISA) has been nominated for 2012 Excellence.Gov awards by the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council.

The charter of the awards is to promote “excellence in advancing the business of government through technology”.  DCO is nominated in the excellence in intergovernmental collaboration. The award recognizes programs that were designed and/or operated with close cooperation and coordination between different levels of government. Examples: social service programs that are funded and overseen by the Federal government but implemented by state and/or local governments; emergency response programs that require cooperation between various governments.

DISA is a combat support agency that plans, engineers, and maintains global net-centric solutions serving a diverse group of autonomously managed United States Department of Defense (DoD) enterprises. These include the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Combatant Commands, and the nation’s military branches.  It launched DCO in 2008 as a collaboration service available to all DoD personel.  Since then hundreds of thousands of users signed up for the service.  DCO supports a large number of operations worldwide ranging from tactical war fighting to day-to-day office use, briefings, mission rehearsals, one-to-one and group on-the-spot collaboration, training, eLearning, and dozens of other functions.

Adobe Connect was selected to power the DCO solution because of its secure architecture and ability to run in a completely secured cloud.  Yet, because of its ease of entry into a meeting, it enables to quickly bring together users from multiple government agencies or even NGOs into a situation room and use that room persistence for both real time and as well as a-synchronous collaboration.

Last summer based on the success of the program, DISA expanded DCO though a $90million dollar contract, possibly the largest contract in the web-conferencing industry.

If you are interested to learn more about DCO, take a look at our case study and or follow DCO on Facebook.

- Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect

We’re pleased to announce that a new Adobe Connect add-in is now available with official support for Mac OS X Lion (10.7.2). The version of the new Mac add-in is 9.4.90.0. The add-in is not required to participate in an Adobe Connect meeting, but it provides additional functionality for meeting hosts and presenters such as screen-sharing and enhanced audio support during a web conference.

The new add-in will be automatically downloaded for all hosts and presenters using a mac when they use functionality specific to the add-in in the latest Adobe Connect 8.2.1 release. If needed, the new add-in can be downloaded and pushed to Mac users in a locked down environment. The new add-in has been tested with Adobe Connect 8.1 and later releases. It’s important that Lion users have updated to the latest Lion build of 10.7.2. Earlier releases of Lion (10.7 or 10.7.1) will not work with the add-in. You can find downloading instruction and a list of Lion-specific issues here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/912/cpsid_91251.html

- Sanjay Agrawal