Adobe Connect Blog

 By Vincent Toesca, Group Product Manager, Adobe Connect

 Almost a year ago, I was discussing in another blog post the ascent of video as a way to enrich interpersonal communications.

This vision is increasingly becoming reality– at home and in the office. There’s not a day passing by without a new announcement around new video or “HD” capabilities by software vendors. What does it mean exactly for those in charge of selecting conferencing solutions? And how fast and how far will these new advancements reach everyday corporate users?

Removing complexity to drive usage

Videoconferencing has been characterized by complex endpoints and obscure acronyms (ISDN, VNOC, MPLS, QoS etc.) that have deterred quite a lot of casual users. No wonder that the utilization rate of these systems is typically less than 5% on a daily basis (source: Gartner, 2010). They also remain chiefly closed-loop systems, with more than 90% of all videoconferencing taking place among endpoints in the same enterprise But while these paltry numbers would give organizations little incentive to add more cost, risk and complexity to grow their video network, recent trends have marked a shift in the fortunes of videoconferencing.

Increasing reach even more than quality

The focus is moving from pure video quality to user experience, with an emphasis on reach and simplicity. The broader availability of camera-equipped devices and the popularization of online video through consumer services are reshaping the landscape. Here are a few usage and technological factors that are involved in this change:

• Software-based vs room-based: the dichotomy between VTC solutions (an expensive combination of endpoints, room systems, MCUs and services) and software-only video services is dissipating, with a gradual convergence of quality, and a faster expansion of the latter.  Meeting attendees who cannot reach a room and who are external to the organizations can participate from desktop- or web-based clients, with quality up to and including HD.
• Quality and bandwidth optimization: new IP video codecs (such as H.264) have dramatically improved video quality, without increasing bandwidth consumption. That is a prerequisite for IT departments, still wary of potential bandwidth overuse on their network. They also enable an experience that is rich and lifelike enough to endear end-users, who expect the fidelity of what they receive and broadcast to be high-quality and compelling. 
• Streaming and delivery: videoconferencing has moved almost completely to IP; all new video endpoints are IP-capable. But the coexistence of different protocols for establishing sessions (H.323, SIP), and the disparities in how well they allow video streams to traverse network firewalls, proxies and NAT, have constrained most organizations to use videoconferencing only internally. This is changing with the standardization on more firewall-friendly technologies, such a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), and the delivery of new video services over managed networks and using SIP trunks.

Fulfilling promises for end-users and administrators alike

With our new Adobe Connect 8 release (now generally available), we have put a specific emphasis on high-quality, hassle-free visual communications. Being the first webconferencing solution offering robust video capabilities, our product had set the pace for bringing new digital experiences and interactions to enterprise customers.

• Deliver from multiple sources: a key new feature of Adobe Connect 8 is the ability to acquire a video stream from a SIP-based room system and broadcast it to all meeting participants present in an Adobe Connect room. Individual participants can also broadcast their own video feed, captured from a webcam. This truly achieves the converge of video streams into one single software-based solution, delivered at an infinitesimal cost over existing network infrastructures. 
• Deliver across screens: Adobe Connect delivers rich video features based on benchmarks set by the conferencing industry. The next challenge will be to optimize the video quality and resolution based on the properties of the receiving devices and increase video portability.  Beyond conventional desktops, the fast-growing penetration of smartphones and tablets with new form factors (e.g. front-facing cameras) and smaller footprint will drive this requirement. Adobe Connect has already embraced the need for accessing conferencing across screens, with mobile versions running on Google Android and Apple iOS; and other platforms are planned for the future.
• Deliver across network boundaries: here comes the foundational advantage of Adobe Connect, with the pervasive and firewall-friendly Adobe Flash platform. Battle-tested in the Internet space, where it supports about 80% of online videos, Adobe Flash provides a delivery mechanism that overcomes a lot of network barriers and improves the prospects for external calling. 

I once heard a senior executive joking about a telepresence meeting he had to attend: he spent over one hour driving to the venue where the telepresence meeting was hosted.  It was probably better than physically flying to the other coast for the meeting, but it certainly fell short of eliminating travel costs and travel time. With Adobe Connect 8 and its future iterations, we’re striving to enable a cost-efficient and user-friendly experience for video, universally delivered thanks to Adobe Flash.

We’re very pleased to announce that Adobe Connect 8 is now available!

On premise customers who are eligible for upgrades will receive an email from us in the coming seven to 10 days with more detail about their upgrade. Additionally, we’ve begun migrating hosted deployments in North America to the new version, will continue a phased rollout over the coming months, and will include hosted customers in other parts of the world in early 2011.

Adobe Connect 8 features a wealth of new and enhanced features and benefits, including a simplified interface for greater usability and enhanced audio and video capabilities for richer experiences. A new software development kit (SDK) offers greater extensibility, the optional Adobe Connect Desktop client (now available for free download here) makes meeting management easier, and Adobe Connect Mobile—available for Apple iOS and Google Android platforms—supports a range of mobile devices for those attending meetings on the go.

For our current customers, there are some great, informative resources available at the Adobe Connect 8 Migration Center, including a migration timeframe indicator for hosted customers, a transition guide, details about the SDK, and an ability to sign up for a 30-day preview account. Please do check out the site.

If you aren’t already an Adobe Connect customer, we encourage you to learn more on our website and take a test drive by signing up for a free, 30-day trial.

We believe Adobe Connect 8 will help you collaborate more effectively, work more efficiently and deliver better results. We’re looking forward to sharing the product with you, starting now.

The Adobe Connect Team

By Vincent Toesca, Group Product Manager, Adobe Connect

Easy is hard. This seemingly contradictory statement could capture well our efforts to simplify our award-winning online meeting and training solution with the release of Adobe Connect 8.

While our previous versions had been praised for providing a sleeker and more user-friendly experience than comparable products, we spent a great deal of time meeting with our customers and listening to one simple but enlightening message they delivered to us: “the feature set of Adobe Connect is much richer than any other; we don’t need more, but better.”

Not more but better. Over the past months, we have worked intensively with Adobe’s user experience researchers, interface designers, engineers and, of course, existing Adobe Connect users to understand how we could improve user interactions and make our meeting interface even more intuitive, especially for casual users. The advent of consumer tools such as public instant messaging networks and IP-based phone-call services, and the smarter form factor of novel electronic devices have accustomed us to simplified digital experiences. We strived to remodel Adobe Connect along those lines, while maintaining our rich set of options for power users.   

Our new meeting user interface not only offers a more compelling design and fresher look but also achieves a better organization and more prominent display of important and frequently used controls and capabilities. Here are a few examples:

• Enhanced audio and video controls. These settings have been regrouped to be accessed from one central place. Now organized at the top of the meeting bar, they are more visible and easily accessible.
• Unified attendee management. All participant management functions can be executed from the Attendee pod, including breakout-out rooms. Participant role and rights can now be updated using drag and drop; a rollover menu enables participants to quickly initiate actions, such as private chats, with each other.
• Optimized screen use. The meeting interface rescales intelligently to provide optimum viewing based on each participant’s screen resolution. Presenters can also size their own version of the presenter-only area individually without impacting the view of other presenters.
• Improved accessibility. Navigation via keyboard and hot keys has been improved and major improvements have been achieved in screen reader compatibility with JAWS and Win-Eyes.
• Advanced chat. Text-based conversations within the meeting room have been reorganized into separate tabs for public and private conversations.
• Rich Notes pod. Rich formatting capabilities have been added in the Notes pod to facilitate the capture of notes and comments during collaborative meeting, save them as rich documents and send them by email after the meeting.
• Simplified Q&A pod. The submission and management of questions during webinar-like sessions has been consolidated into one single frame, with differentiated views for presenters and participants.
• Enhanced Whiteboard. New workflows, such as quickly adding text to custom shapes, have been added. The whiteboard can also be used in the overlay mode on top of a shared document to zoom and pan along with the document.

In this simplification process, we have made sure to preserve all the key workflows that Adobe Connect users have come to rely upon for their meeting and training needs. But overall, they are now easier to discover and use.

Not more but better, I wrote earlier. But a little more too, in this new release. New back-end capabilities, such as integration with videoconferencing systems, duplex universal voice and enhanced room access protection, are hallmark features of Adobe Connect 8. They enable our customers to leverage their existing investments in adjacent communications systems, such as audioconferencing and videoconferencing platforms, and provide their employees and partners with a more unified and coherent digital experience for collaboration.

In future posts, my team and I will be glad to continue to walk you through the new benefits of Adobe Connect 8. We look forward to having you use our new version.  Our official trial will be available very soon, but if you’d like to get a sneak peek now – you are invited to sign up for a free 30-day account offered as part of our customer preview program. If you are a current customer, we have created the Adobe Connect 8 Migration Center  to help you prepare for the new version.  If you are a Hosted Services customer, we have a widget on that page that you can use to look up your anticipated upgrade date.

We hope you will enjoy Adobe Connect 8 with the same excitement and enthusiasm as we put into building it.

By Arun Anantharaman, VP and GM, Adobe Connect

We are excited to announce the next major release of Adobe’s web conferencing solution—Adobe Connect 8.  The team has been hard at work innovating and we are thrilled to make this release available shortly. 

We listened to our enterprise and government customers about their web conferencing needs and found a number of common themes. Customers are asking for help delivering rich and engaging training through virtual classrooms; accelerating customer acquisition through interactive webinars; extending their web meetings to support key business processes; integrating with existing audio and video conferencing investments; supporting an increasing mobile world; and providing web conferencing capabilities that are easy for first time users but powerful enough for seasoned pros. Simple, right?

With Adobe Connect 8 we have significantly improved the collaboration experience. Adobe Connect 8 builds on the existing key benefits of the product, including ease of meeting entry, richness of interactions, security and control features, deployment flexibility and in-product extensibility. We have also expanded our integration with existing audio and video systems and extended our mobile support for Google Android and Apple iOS devices. And we are introducing a desktop AIR-based client to better manage meetings and access to recordings.

We believe Adobe Connect is simply the best enterprise web conferencing solution on the market today.

We look forward to working with you and helping solve your collaboration challenges!