Adobe Connect Blog

Our second edition of our Adobe Connect Satisfaction Survey is open until November 20.  Please take a moment to let us know your thoughts on our we are doing.  Your input is invaluable to help us prioritize product development investments.

You can access the survey at : http://bit.ly/adobeconnectsat

You can review the results of the previous survey in one of my previous blog post, here.

To thank you for taking the time to fill in the survey you will be enrolled in a draw to win a copy of Photoshop CS5.

Looking forward to read all your survey questionnaires.

By Randah McKinnie, Sr Product Manager

Just as Adobe MAX 2010 kicks into full swing, and following the release of Adobe AIR for Android, I am thrilled to announce Adobe Connect Mobile for Android is now available in the Android Market. Now you can attend Adobe Connect meetings from your Android device. Literally collaborate anytime, anywhere, as you participate in chat conversations, view slides and presentations, and watch live video feeds of any number of meeting participants.

And all this for free!

We hope your colleagues, team members, and customers find it convenient to have yet another great option to jump in to an Adobe Connect meeting even when on the move.

Please download the app today and try attending the next Adobe Connect meeting on your schedule from an Android device. We hope you enjoy the experience, and encourage you to provide feedback and enhancement requests by joining in to our Adobe Connect Mobile user community forum: http://www.connectusers.com/forums/cucbb/viewforum.php?id=53

And, remember we also have an Adobe Connect Mobile application for Apple iOS devices; it’s been available since February 2010. We’ve updated the application a few times since then, including just in the last few days. You can read more about it on iTunes Preview here.

Features of the Adobe Connect Mobile meeting attendance app:

• Attend any Adobe Connect meeting that is accessible from the web
• Listen and speak over two-way VOIP audio
• Join the meeting’s conference call for two-way telephone participation
• Watch the presentation in real-time and high resolution
• Watch streaming videos presented in meetings
• Live chat with other participants and Q&A with hosts
• Watch live video streams of meeting participants who are broadcasting their cameras

Product Forum and Release Notes 

System Requirements

• Android v2.2 and above
• Adobe AIR for Android
• Current certified devices: Google Nexus One and Motorola Droid
  (While we have not yet tested against other Android devices, we expect they may also run the application just fine.)

 Reading this on your PC?

Scan this barcode with your Android device to download.

 
Click here to view the app in the Android Marketplace

Reading this on your Android device?

Click here to download from your Android device.

And if you’re not already, follow us on Twitter for the latest on Adobe Connect: @adobeconnect.

Two weeks ago, I spoke at a panel at IT Expo.  The subject of the panel was: Business Continuity via a Travel Reduction Plan.  Trade shows like IT Expo are great to get a feel for what a lot of decision makers are thinking, or key marketing trends.

On the panel web conferencing was a hot topic. Here is a summary of topics covered on the panel and conversations I had at the show.

For right or wrong, web conferencing is no longer about travel cost savings.  Most IT departments assume that because they have rolled out web conferencing, they have provided their organization the tool to reduce travel cost.  But I have not met anyone who could tell me precisely how much their web conferencing deployment is saving them on travel cost, nor how much more they could save if they were able to drive more usage out of their web conferencing solution.   This is inline with what we are seeing with Adobe Connect.  Our customers are no longer justifying their deployment or extension of Adobe Connect in terms of cost saving but rather in terms of productivity improvement or top-line revenue increase. Many training organization see their biggest growth from online classes: the experience they provide online becomes mission critical.

Next key topic was Unified Communications.  At IT expo, many people recognize that UC was a marketing ploy from large vendor to try to bundle together multiple technologies with different maturities.  For many it seemed a technology in search of a problem as opposed to a clear solution to a business need.  Most people had chosen to deploy best of breed architecture and were desperate that all large vendors could not agree on a common standard for UC either from a signalization level, presence indication or video codecs.  Instead of focusing on adding features and technology to UC, vendors should focus on ease of use: a lot of organization employ directly or indirectly full time staff to help people launch their video conference !  Simplification of the UI has always be a major focus for Adobe Connect and all the more so in our upcoming Connect 8 release.

Final hot topic was around Social Media and generational divide in the enterprise.  Most people agreed that Social Media had still not discovered a killer app in the enterprise that would spur a large growth.  It was also recognized that the growth of Social Media, or collaboration in general including web conferencing, is hindered by cultural factor.  In many organization, people use to gain power by retaining information.  Social Media change this paradigm: people gain power by sharing too much information !

Thank you very much to all of you who took the time to answer our satisfaction survey in April. And congratulations to the winner of Photoshop CS5 at the University of Maine ! (For legal reason, I can not disclose the full name of the winner).

Let me now share with you some of the results and surprises from the survey and what we are doing about it.

Let’s start with some logistical items. We initially planned to run this survey on a quarterly basis. But due to the overwhelming amount of responses we got and the feed-back that the survey might be too long, we decided to do a couple of things: shorten the survey and run it twice a year instead of four times a year as planned.

What did we learn with this first edition of the survey:

About your usage of Adobe Connect:

General Collaboration, Seminar/Webcast and Training are the main use cases for Adobe Connect in your organizations. All of you have deployed Connect Meeting and over 50% of you have deployed Adobe Presenter as key modules of the Adobe Connect solution. Finally, 60% of you use Adobe Connect hosted by Adobe, where 30% chose to deploy on-premise, behind their firewall, and 10% using managed services. Over 50% of you have been using Connect for at least 2 years. In terms of feature usage, we were surprised by 2 things: first the ability to upload powerpoint in a room was ranked higher than screen sharing; second, we were surprised by the number of people using our Collaboration Builder SDK or XML API.

About your product satisfaction:

We were pleased to get an overall high satisfaction score with the product and its various aspects. Some areas scored higher than the average: the Connect Meeting and Seminar modules; the Connect hosted service or the on-prem installer; the ease of use of the product. Other scored lower than the average: support, Adobe Presenter module, VoIP. These results did not surprise us and the survey helped us ensure we execute more quickly on actions plan already in progress to improve each area.

Actions plans:

On Adobe Connect Support: our Technical Response Team (Tier 3) helped by the Connect engineering and product management teams launched earlier this year a program to improve the Connect and Presenter knowledge of the Tier 1 support teams to ensure we could answer your issues faster. The support group also re-designed call workflows to make sure you can talk to a Connect technician much faster. We are running on-going satisfaction survey with every support call and since may june we have observed much higher satisfaction scores for people calling into our support team a clear sign that all the work we put to improve support is yielding good results.

On Adobe Presenter: Adobe Presenter is a great rapid e-learning tool that enables any subject matter expert to turn a Powerpoint presentation into Flash content with video, voice over and quizz. Adobe Presenter is a plug-in to Microsoft Powerpoint, but it traditionally shipped with each new version of Adobe Connect (instead of shipping with every new version of Powerpoint). That created issues like what is happening currently where Microsoft shipped Office 2010 in June 2010 but Connect 8 will not ship until later this year. What we have done is decouple the Presenter team from the Connect team to ensure they can release independently of the Connect releases. The team did their first release Presenter 7.0.6 recently which provides important bug fixes and Microsoft Office 2010 compatibility.

On VoIP: With Connect 7 and the increase usage of VoIP in Connect meeting (driven by the fact that users are more and more comfortable using Skype like technologies), some customers reported issues with VoIP quality in constrained bandwidth environment. With Connect 7.5 first last december and 7.5 SP1 in april, we made significant improvement on VoIP quality by improving compression and echo cancellation on both MAC and PC. Since the roll-out of 7.5 SP1, we have seen notable improvement and as the results our volume of call to support re: VoIP have dropped significantly. You can expect us to continuously drive improvement on Voice and Video in the coming release as we leverage innovations built in the Flash Player.

What’s next?

We are not done. To ensure your satisfaction, it is important that you tell us what we can do better on a regular basis. Since the last survey, we released 2 service packs, worked hard to improve support: did we successfully solve some of the issues you reported us in the last survey? Please take 10 minutes of your time to let us know when the new survey becomes available later this month. As with the previous survey, you will be able to win a copy of Photoshop Cs5 by doing so.