Adobe Connect Blog

Welcome ConnectNow customers to the Adobe Connect family! On November 14th, Adobe announced that ConnectNow customers with a paid account will be transitioned to Adobe Connect. ConnectNow will be decommissioned at that time. This transition means you now have all the power of Adobe Connect for free for one year. You will receive your new Adobe Connect account information in early December. During your one year trial we are confident that you will become addicted to Adobe Connect.

With Adobe Connect you can expect:

• Engaging and interactive meetings for up to 25 people
• Mobile collaboration with Adobe Connect Mobile 2.0
• Unlimited number of meeting rooms
• Persistent content and content storage
• Video and rich media streaming
• Meeting recordings with editing capabilities
• A ‘backstage’ area for hosts and presenters
• Enhanced security
• Universal VoIP

Discover more about these new features you will enjoy as well as other advanced functionality available with an expanded version of Adobe Connect by viewing the Adobe Connect vs ConnectNow Matrix.

When you receive you account in December we’d like to invite you to take advantage of resources we’ve made available to get you up and running quickly:

• Attend a Live Transition Webinar
• Participate in User Free Live Daily Training
• Download a Quick Start Guide:
       Participant Quick Start Guide
       Host Quick Start Guide

To view all of these resources and to join our user community, please visit the getting started learning center on ConnectUsers.com.

As you enjoy the power of the Adobe Connect Meeting Module, we’d like to invite you to consider using Adobe Connect for more advanced uses like marketing webinars, virtual classrooms, mobile learning and more.

Marketing Webinars: Adobe Connect for Webinars helps you deliver compelling, immersive events; maximize attendance; and measure results to optimize
outcomes. Adobe Connect allows you to:

• Create custom registration microsites with built-in Adobe CQ technology
• Measure event effectiveness with analytics powered by Adobe SiteCatalyst
• Deliver exceptional event experiences that inspire action
• Increase attendance by providing access from virtually any device and lowering barriers to entry

eLearning: Adobe Connect for eLearning provides a complete solution for rapid training and mobile learning, enabling rapid deployment of training accessible from anywhere, anytime, on virtually any device. Adobe Connect allows you to:

• Enable mobile learning on virtually any device
• Rapidly create and deploy engaging content
• Deliver immersive experiences in live and on-demand classes
• Efficiently manage and track training

To check out these options just download a 30-day trial of Adobe Connect fully loaded with the Event and Training Modules or learn more on our website.

Welcome and enjoy your free 1-year subscription!

Sales Contact:
North America: info@clarix.com or (800) 457-6613
Outside North America: connectsales@adobe.com
Government: 800-685-3644

When setting up an Adobe Connect meeting room – whether it’s for a virtual classroom, a webinar, or simply a persistent digital office – it’s important to consider which audio options to use.

The obvious reason to tie your audio information to your Adobe Connect room is so that you can record the meeting and make it available on-demand. There are three different options in Adobe Connect for audio:

1. Voice Over IP (VoIP). This option is provided at no charge to our customers. A meeting host or presenter can use a microphone – typically as part of a USB headset – to broadcast audio to all participants. A microphone button in the Adobe Connect interface toggles the audio on and off. It can be optimized for a single speaker or multiple speakers. This is the most straightforward option since it doesn’t require any phones at all. An Audio Wizard in the ‘Meeting’ menu will help you optimize the sound quality to provide the best experience. VoIP is ideal for large meetings and webinars with a small number of speakers.
2. Integrated Telephony. This feature enables customers to tightly integrate and control an audio conference directly from the Adobe Connect meeting room. The room can dial-out to participants, the host can see who’s speaking at any given time and even control the volume of everyone on the call including the ability mute specific individuals. This tight integration requires a special audio bridge; so it’s not available for every audio conferencing provider. Integrated telephony is available for Arkadin,Intercall, MeetingOne and PGi. Integrated Telephony is ideal for smaller, more collaborative meetings where everyone needs the option to speak.
3. Universal Voice. Our third option combines VoIP and telephony. Universal Voice (UV) is a feature to enable Adobe Connect to dial into virtually any audio conference – even if it is not an integrated telephony provider. Adobe Connect dials into the audio conference as an additional participant – so the host doesn’t get the same level of control over the audio as they might using Integrated Telephony. The audio can be broadcast via VoIP meaning that participants don’t have to dial in at all, they can simply listen via their computer speakers. Participants on VoIP can hear those on the phone and vice versa. UV has the benefit of reducing toll charges since audio can be broadcast and you can use your existing audio bridge for those who need or want to dial in. Because of it’s flexibility, UV can be ideal for meetings of any size. Larger meeting and webinars should take advantage of the ability to broadcast VOIP, where smaller meetings will be better served if everyone dials in.

Adobe is currently investigating reports of a compromise of a Connectusers.com forum database. These reports first started circulating late during the day on Tuesday, November 13, 2012. At this point of our investigation, it appears that the Connectusers.com forum site was compromised by an unauthorized third party. It does not appear that any other Adobe services, including the Adobe Connect conferencing service itself, were impacted.

To protect Connectusers forum users, we have taken the following actions:

• The Connectusers.com forum site was taken offline in the evening of Tuesday, November 13, 2012. We are working diligently to restore forum services as soon as possible.
• We are in the process of resetting the passwords of impacted Connectusers.com forum members and will reach out to those members with instructions on how to set up new passwords once the forum services are restored.

As a reminder, one of the best ways to protect yourself online is to follow password best practices and use different login credentials across different websites and services.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may cause to our forum members. Your security is of critical importance to us, and we appreciate your patience as we work towards restoring Connectusers.com forum services.

With the launch of Adobe Connect 9, I have talked with many customers and prospects over the last few month.  They gave me unique insights into their Unified Communications deployments.  One key observation they all made was that the “one stack from one vendor” approach to unified communication does not work.  They gave me three fundamental reasons to explain this.

#1: Single stacks are not so seamless

For the last ten years, the Ciscos and Microsofts of the world went on convincing customers to buy a single stack unified communcations solution from one single vendor. Audio, Video, Web from one single vendor.  The promise was to provide greater ROI and faster deployments from one single unified stack.  But the only thing that is truly unified in their UC offering is the price list.  For the rest deloyments are incredibly complex and difficult to scale.  The different pieces, directory, IM, voice, web conferencing are not at all seamless neither on the server side or client side, creating very poor user experience which slows user adoption.

#2: UC was built for PC era

UC was built on the premise that voice would integrate with web application on the PC. But in the meantime, web application have integrated with voice on mobile devices which are procured in a completely new paradigm that does not fit the traditional UC stack:  Bring Your Own Device.  UC vendors are struggling releasing UC mobile apps across devices that will work the same across all the highly custom UC deployments of their multiple customers.  In the mean time, users are resorting to Skype …

#3: Communication is about culture, not technology

Communication is fundamentally NOT about technology, it is about culture.  Within a same organization, you can expect each group, business unit, department, to have their own collaboration and communication culture influenced by cultural differences of course, but also their different needs: do they collaborate in small group, large group, do they use the tools for training, for webinars, do they prefer to collaborate live or a-synchronously.   The one size fits all of single UC stack solution does not work in these environments, as it struggles to meet all the requirements of these different group.  And in an era of consumerization of IT, no business group is going to wait on IT to deploy a solution that fits their need.  They will go an buy it themselves.  So as a result a lot of UC deployment are actually not used by many group of users.