Adobe Connect Blog

By Alistair Lee, Sr. Product Enablement Manager

Despite the huge number of capabilities in Adobe Connect, the one question I never have a problem answering is: “What’s your favorite feature?”  That’s easy – it’s the Collaboration Builder SDK.

SDK stands for Software Developer Kit and it’s what gives our customers and partners the ability to extend Adobe Connect meetings in virtually any way they’d like.  What makes all of this possible is that Adobe Connect is based on Adobe Flash.  While most people recognize that Flash eliminates barriers to entry (no additional downloads or installs) and provides a tremendously rich experience – its potential to add additional features to the meeting isn’t always immediately obvious.

In fact, the SDK isn’t even required to load custom flash content into an Adobe Connect meeting room.  You can load a Flash application into any share pod and, in most cases, it will work perfectly.  

The Collaboration Builder SDK, which also supports Adobe Flex and ActionScript 3, helps to make that Flash content aware it’s in an Adobe Connect room.  It gives the author the ability to synchronize all of the different instances of the application so that participants can interact with each other.  It can also help by enabling different views of the application based on role (Host, Presenter, or Participant) and can listen for events like someone joining or leaving a meeting.

In this video, I’ll show you one of the custom pods I created to help customers incorporate Twitter search terms into their meetings.  We’ve used it for virtual conferences – like the Adobe Developer Week – to allow for better participation and collaboration during the event.  It allowed us to incorporate messages from multiple sessions into a single view.

You can download the custom pod here.

Hello! Michael Londgren here. I look after product marketing for Adobe Connect at the company. Checking in today about the 2010 Gartner, Inc. “Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing”.

As we announced in late November, Adobe was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of the research report. We were one of 15 vendors evaluated in the report.

Of those vendors positioned in the Leaders Quadrant, David Mario Smith of Gartner wrote in the report:

“Vendors in the Leaders Quadrant have achieved significant market share while demonstrating an ability to respond to customers’ needs. Leaders have robust, scalable products with a wide range of features, a large installed base, acceptable financial performance and good distribution. Leaders are doing well today and are prepared for the future.”

We encourage you to check out the complete report for yourself here (.pdf).

And you can learn more about Adobe Connect here.

Cheers,

Michael

Votes have been cast and the results are in – we’re thrilled that Adobe Connect has won both the Best Web Seminar and Best Virtual Classroom categories in this year’s Best of Elearning! awards program.

Best of Elearning! recognition is particularly noteworthy because nominations and winners are entirely determined by the readers of Elearning! magazine – executives and business managers engaged in the areas of enterprise learning and workforce technology.

Nominations and voting were conducted online during August and September. Given both the quality of competition and quantity of nominations – this year featured 1,730 nominations, covering 37 companies and 67 products – we’re thankful to all of you who took the time to vote in support of Adobe Connect!

You can read more about all the award winners, including us, on the Elearning! site here.

And if you’re not already following us on Twitter, check us out @AdobeConnect.

By Guillaume Privat, Director Product Management, Adobe Connect

The Product Management team is really excited to bring you Adobe Connect 8.  The release had been 2 years in the making and was a colossal effort for the entire team.

We are now planning what Adobe Connect NEXT will be all about and would like your input.  Help us write what the next release will be about.

In partnership with Brightidea, we have launched the Adobe Connect Ideas site where you can submit new ideas for the product, review and vote on ideas posted by others.

Traditionally, we have received feed-back from users either directly by email, via our sales engineers, via our partners and resellers, via the forums on Connectusers.com.  But as the community of Adobe Connect users continue to grow, we need a central system where you can easily express your ideas about the product and get input from other users.

Get started today.  Go to http://ideas.adobe.com/connect . You will need an Adobe ID to post or review ideas or comments.