Adobe Connect Blog

Defense Connect Online (DCO), the Adobe Connect and XMPP chat deployment at the US Department of Defense run by the Defense System Information Agency (DISA) has been nominated for 2012 Excellence.Gov awards by the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council.

The charter of the awards is to promote “excellence in advancing the business of government through technology”.  DCO is nominated in the excellence in intergovernmental collaboration. The award recognizes programs that were designed and/or operated with close cooperation and coordination between different levels of government. Examples: social service programs that are funded and overseen by the Federal government but implemented by state and/or local governments; emergency response programs that require cooperation between various governments.

DISA is a combat support agency that plans, engineers, and maintains global net-centric solutions serving a diverse group of autonomously managed United States Department of Defense (DoD) enterprises. These include the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Combatant Commands, and the nation’s military branches.  It launched DCO in 2008 as a collaboration service available to all DoD personel.  Since then hundreds of thousands of users signed up for the service.  DCO supports a large number of operations worldwide ranging from tactical war fighting to day-to-day office use, briefings, mission rehearsals, one-to-one and group on-the-spot collaboration, training, eLearning, and dozens of other functions.

Adobe Connect was selected to power the DCO solution because of its secure architecture and ability to run in a completely secured cloud.  Yet, because of its ease of entry into a meeting, it enables to quickly bring together users from multiple government agencies or even NGOs into a situation room and use that room persistence for both real time and as well as a-synchronous collaboration.

Last summer based on the success of the program, DISA expanded DCO though a $90million dollar contract, possibly the largest contract in the web-conferencing industry.

If you are interested to learn more about DCO, take a look at our case study and or follow DCO on Facebook.

- Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect

We’re pleased to announce that a new Adobe Connect add-in is now available with official support for Mac OS X Lion (10.7.2). The version of the new Mac add-in is 9.4.90.0. The add-in is not required to participate in an Adobe Connect meeting, but it provides additional functionality for meeting hosts and presenters such as screen-sharing and enhanced audio support during a web conference.

The new add-in will be automatically downloaded for all hosts and presenters using a mac when they use functionality specific to the add-in in the latest Adobe Connect 8.2.1 release. If needed, the new add-in can be downloaded and pushed to Mac users in a locked down environment. The new add-in has been tested with Adobe Connect 8.1 and later releases. It’s important that Lion users have updated to the latest Lion build of 10.7.2. Earlier releases of Lion (10.7 or 10.7.1) will not work with the add-in. You can find downloading instruction and a list of Lion-specific issues here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/912/cpsid_91251.html

- Sanjay Agrawal

As we kick off an exciting new year, we are pleased to announce the limited public beta for the next version of Adobe Connect for Webinars solution (codename Maple). We have been working on the release for months with the focus on helping our customers deliver compelling, immersive webinars, maximize event attendance, and measure results to optimize workflows – and ultimately improve the ROI of campaigns and events.

We will be accepting 100 beta participants on a first come first serve basis. If you are interested in joining the beta, please fill out the beta interest form.

From the Maple beta you will also be able to try out the beta version of Adobe Connect Mobile for Android. This beta version significantly expands the amount of controls and rich capabilities available for Adobe Connect users on mobile phones and tablets.  Note that we currently have leading mobile applications for Android, iOS, and Blackberry Playbook now available as well – you can check them out here.

This is certainly an exciting time for Adobe Connect and we are thrilled to share with you the latest beta versions of our solutions for your feedback. Stay tuned for more news from us and don’t forget to follow us on @AdobeConnect for the latest updates.

We wish you all a terrific 2012.

-Paresh Kharya (@pareshkharya), Senior Product Manager, Adobe Connect

Adobe Connect provides a number of features for eLearning, including the ability to easily create and deliver compelling self-paced online courses, conduct highly interactive virtual classes, and efficiently manage training programs.

This new video serves as a fantastic introduction and showcases a few organizations that are doing great things with our solution.

You can read more about our eLearning offering here. We’ll also continue to share stories, tips, news and more on Twitter – follow @AdobeConnect.