Adobe Connect Blog

Part of my current focus in my product management role on the Connect team is the Connect Pro web service APIs (you can find more documentation on what they are here). Given my background in ColdFusion I thought it would be an interesting experiment using the API’s inconjunction with ColdFusion. I was surprised to find very little via google on using ColdFusion with Connect as I’m sure it’s something lots of folks have played around with.
Anyway as part of my learning I’ve started to pull together a CFC facade that makes achieving common API calls less verbose and returns Connect XML structures back to the ColdFusion developer as Query objects types (as I prefer them to work with given the increased ease, flexibility and performance over XML object types from within ColdFusion.
It’s pretty rudimentary at this point as I’ve only invested a couple of hours of time, but wanted to share the CFC with you.
Currently I’ve only implemented the following Connect API methods
- login
- logout
- get-my-meetings
I’ve done no code optimisation or refactoring, so please no comments on how shoddy the code really is …
Here’s an example of using the CFC facade to login and get a list of my meetings

And here’s the output when you throw the query object into HTML using the CFDUMP tag

The important thing to note here is what this code would need to look like without the Connect Facade CFC, which is something like this

As you can see it’s fairly basic at this point, but as the coming weeks I plan to further expand the API coverage, optimise the code and then start to integrate it with LiveCycle Data Services to demonstrate taking Connect content offline using an AIR application.
Until then enjoy playing with the 0.1 release of my ConnectFacade CFC
Oh, I forgot to mention I make use of the very useful XmlTOStruct CFC by Anuj Gakhar, which can be found here
cheers
Mark

A recent review of Adobe Presenter 7 was posted on the Digital Inspiration blog. Among the soundbites:
“Other than slides, you can add audio narrations, record webcam video or import existing video clips into your presentations. It supports almost every video format from MOV to AVI to 3GB and encodes them internally to Flash video using the On2 FLV encoder.”
“[I]f you aren’t too happy with the default factory settings, no worries – almost everything inside Presenter can be easily customized and branded included the color schemes, fonts, layout, logos and so on.”
“Overall, to call Adobe Presenter as a ‘PowerPoint add-in’ doesn’t do enough justice to the program. It is extremely capable, requires no training and brings Flash output to your existing PowerPoint…”
Check out the full review here:
http://www.labnol.org/software/adobe-presenter-for-powerpoint-review/4438/

Recently the Gartner 2008 Web Conferencing Magic Quadrant report was released and for the second year in a row Adobe is in the “leadership” quadrant…the most prestigious ranking possible.
The key strengths mention in the report include:

• Based on Adobe Flash, the company’s Web-conferencing offering can be deployed easily. It has resizable screen displays for users, authoring capabilities and less intensive bandwidth requirements for video.
• Native integration with Adobe Acrobat enables document-centric real-time collaboration with Web conferencing from within the document.
• Adobe’s product provides compliance features, with logging and tracking of use and communications.

In the overview portion of the report, Gartner noted that “Adobe may be the best so far for desktop video because Adobe Flash is less intensive on bandwidth.” They also briefly mentioned our new basic web conferencing tool, ConnectNow, as one of several examples where enterprise vendors are offering scaled-down versions of their Web-conferencing services.
The Connect Pro team is very proud of this achievement as we pride ourselves on maintaining our reputation as the most visionary and robust web conferencing product on the market. Along with our recent wins at the Software & Information Industry Association’s CODIE Award for Best Collaboration Solution, PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice award for web conferencing, and Training Media Review’s recent 4-star assessment, it’s been a very good year!