June 30, 2008
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/
June 27, 2008
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
June 26, 2008
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.
Continue reading…
June 25, 2008
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
In my first post, I wanted to quickly introduce myself to the Acrobat Connect Pro community.
My name is Mark Blair, some folks may know of me through my work for Adobe, Macromedia and Allaire in Asia Pacific over the last 8 years. I held various roles over the years including Technical Director, running Consulting in the Pacific and leading our server initiatives in the Asia Pacific region. All of these roles were obviously field based with a heavy technical sales focus. I’m looking forward to putting that field knowledge and experience to good use in my role in the Connect Pro product team. As part of me taking the role I relocated to San Francisco from Australia with my family.
My focus in the Connect team is on developing the appropriate partnerships to bring new capabilities to Connect and expose Connect to new markets. I’d be interested to hear feedback in this area as I begin to get up to speed with my new role at Adobe.
