Adobe Connect Blog

A terrific case study on Adobe Connect’s widespread use across the U.S. Department of Defense was recently published by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), a nonprofit organization working to address challenges in energy and climate change. The U.S. government has come under pressure in recent years to achieve substantial cost savings and productivity improvements, due to severe budget constraints, as well as mandates to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gases. Jason Ye and Stephen Seidel from C2ES have published a full report on how the U.S. federal government is using information and communications technologies to address these challenges. The report includes a series of eight case studies around topics including shifting to cloud computing and redesigning workspaces, but most interesting to me was how the U.S. Department of Defense is leveraging Defense Connect Online (DCO), a service delivering web conferencing powered by Adobe Connect and instant messaging/presence via an XMPP client, enabling anywhere, anytime collaboration across over 700,000 users.

Leveraging DCO, the Department of Defense has been able to achieve benefits including a stronger system supporting continuity of operations (COOP), increases in telework, progress toward environmental and sustainability goals/mandates, and substantial cost savings with reductions in travel.

The report describes examples of some of the key use cases that DCO enables, such as command-and-control for military personnel to coordinate tactical battle planning, sharing information in real-time across ground, satellite, and air; and disaster relief scenarios, namely coordination of efforts during the 2010 Haiti earthquake across military units, non-profit organizations and multilateral organizations, to save lives and maximize relief an rescue efforts.

The complete report can be viewed here, with the case study of DCO available in pdf format here.

It is exciting to see such a powerful example of how Adobe Connect is helping to enable these types of achievements across the world. We look forward to working hard and enabling our customers to achieve greater and greater success.

Our newly released Adobe Connect Mobile 2.0 offers new and unlimited possibilities to take your web meetings to new levels.  This week we will take a look at how you can multi-screen your meetings.

One of the key trend in the digital home is multi-screen entertainment.  You can watch TV, but at the same time from a tablet or smartphone, chat or tweet with others watching the same program, or look-up some information about the players in the game or actors in the movie watched.

The same can now be done with Adobe Connect.  Log into your meeting from both your PC and your tablet for example  (Adobe Connect allows you to log as multiple hosts).  Set-up the meeting layout and manage the participants from the PC.  Control the slide changes from either the PC or your tablet.  But as soon as whiteboarding is required, use your tablet to whiteboard over the slides you uploaded from your PC.  You no longer need specialized equipment like a Wacom tablet to really be able to write complex math equations or draw complex objects faster: your finger (or a stylus) and a tablet will do the trick.

This opens a lot of brand new possibilities to take whiteboarding to a brand new level and make it much more useful to present information instead of relying to slides.

Happy whiteboarding everyone !

Last year, we had a very successful Adobe Connect User group for Government Customers in Wahsington DC.  To view a recap of the event, click here.  We are holding our second edition of this meeting next week, on September 19th in Washington DC.

If you are working in a Government agencies and are using Adobe Connect for telework or emergency response, continuity of operations, training or collaboration, you should plan on attending the event. We will be covering a lot of topics around the recent launch of Adobe Connect 9, how mobility is reshaping collaboration and e-learning:

• Discover the latest technical enhancements in Adobe Connect 9 and how it introduces innovations in comprehensive webinars, mobile collaboration, and mobile learning.
• Learn how to leverage your current video teleconferencing solutions to collaborate in the conference room and on your mobile device.
• Hear from and network with fellow colleagues about how they use Adobe Connect.
• Learn how to report, manage, and track to provide comprehensive results.
• Learn best practices for webcasts to enhance user experience.

But most importantly, you will be able to network with your peers using Adobe Connect and interact with the Adobe Connect Government Product Management team to give feed-back and provide input on what you would like to see in the future releases of the product.

As we know everyone is extremely busy, we kept the meeting to half a day from 8am to noon.  To learn more or register, follow this link: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07e681kv3if3ec3d83&llr=y9xzrxdab

See you next week in DC !

Welcome back from your labor day break !  I hope you had a great summer.  If you have not paid attention to some of the announcements made by Adobe over the summer in the e-learning space, let me recap them briefly:

- Captivate 6 was introduced in July with the ability to publish to HTML5 , in order to publish e-learning content that can work cross devices.

- Presenter 8 was introduced in July part of the new e-Learning Suite release.  Along with Presenter 8 came an iOS app available for free on the app store.   It enables to play back Presenter authored content on any iOS device.

- Adobe Connect 9 was launched in August with the ability to support SCORM content and to support HTML5 content like the one out-put by Captivate 6.  It also introduced a brand new registration catalog based on Adobe CQ leading web content management platform.

- Connect Mobile 2.0 app became available both on the AppStore and Google Play as a free app.  It enables not only learners to attend a virtual classroom from any device, but most importably teacher to teach a class from any device, with the ability to whiteboard, load documents, change lay-outs etc…

All these announcements mean that today using all the tools that make up our Adobe Digital Learning Solution, you can author content that will run on any device, add this content in structured curriculum our courses, deploy these courses live or on-demand across any device and report on the pass/fail score but also on the effectiveness of the content.

We will talk more about this end to end e-learning solution for any device that we released over the summer at our coming e-Learning Summit.  To learn more or register, please visit:  http://bit.ly/MYEW9J