Last week, Adobe announced the availability of a new release of Adobe Presenter 8. The release is specifically for customers on Adobe Software Assurance plans for Adobe Presenter and the eLearning Suite – though all of the features will eventually make it into the next major release of Adobe Presenter.
There are a significant number of new features included in the new release.
Windows 8 & Microsoft Office 2013 Support
The latest update adds official support for both Windows 8 as well as Microsoft Powerpoint 2013. Newer Powerpoint objects like SmartArt and animations are also supported.
A new audio workflow.
The team has worked to simplify and improve the experience around recording audio and synchronizing it to your Powerpoint slides. The new interface is looks much more modern and makes the functionality easier than ever to use.
Closed Captions
Captions can now be generated automatically for your audio track in the video creator tool. Adobe Presenter translates your narration into text using cloud based computing. Captions are delivered back to the user who can make further edits. It’s very impressive functionality – and you can see it in action below:
Improved Interactions Library
Adobe Presenter 8.0 launched with a new feature that enables customers to add interactive elements to their on-demand courses. In this update, additional interactions have been added – including games like Hangman and Jigsaw.
Improved mobile app for Adobe Presenter.
The team has updated Adobe Presenter Mobile for iOS to incorporate tracking via Adobe Connect.
If you’re not familiar with Adobe Presenter, I’ve embedded a quick overview video below. Note that this overview doens’t include the great new features added to Adobe Presenter 8.1.
The American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) recently announced the 25 finalists for its 12th annual 2013 Excellence.gov Awards Program. Established by ACT-IAC in 2001, the Excellence.gov Awards Program recognizes exceptional government programs and projects that fuel government efficiency, interagency collaboration, and the delivery of impactful citizen services through innovative technologies.
Defense Connect Online (DCO) has been chosen as a finalist in the category of Excellence in Intergovernmental Collaboration. DCO is a deployment of Adobe Connect for the Department of Defense managed by DISA. In addition to DCO, other very prominent programs highlighted in this category include:
• North American Day Public Health Alerts Pilot Project 2012 – Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
• Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) Website – Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC), DOD
• Utah OneStop Business Registration (OSBR) – Utah Department of Technology Services, State of Utah
• Veterans Job Bank – U.S Department of Veteran Affairs
The Awards luncheon is being held at the Grand Hyatt in Washington DC on March 5, 2013, where the winners will be announced in each of the five categories and honoring all finalists.
The Adobe Digital Marketing Summit is taking place in Salt Lake City, March 4 – 8. It is the premium event to explore the latest tools and trends in the digital marketing arena.
Webinars, or digital events, are fast becoming a critical tool used by marketers to find prospects, nurture leads or educate customers. Budget once reserved to live tradeshows or live events is shifting towards online webinars. Yet, marketers find it hard to measure the effectiveness of their webinars because the analytics they get is completely siloed.
Producing a webinar can be broken down into three parts:
Getting prospects / customers to register for the event and attend
Engage the audience during the actual events (or post the event with a recording)
Forward the leads generated to sales
Each part generate its own set of analytics which is not integrated. For example, for the first part, marketers typically get insight on how many people came to the registration site set-up from the different marketing campaigns that they have run (do they come from banner ads, google ads, social media engagement). For the last part, they get an overall idea of how many total leads they generated for sales. But it is very hard for them to answer one very simple question: which campaign actually generated the most qualified leads? was it the banner ads, the google ads or the social media engagement?
Adobe Connect 9 provides out of the box the close loop analytics required to answer this question. But it can do much more. Come to the Adobe Summit to learn how you can leverage other tools from the Adobe Marketing Tools to optimize your webinar programs and integrate them within your digital marketing strategy:
Learn how to test multiple registration form to identify which ones drives the most registration with Test and Target
Learn how to incorporate registration within your social media strategy with Adobe Experience Manager
Learn how to add behavioral information from webinars into your lead scoring strategy with Adobe Analytics
There are many more reason to attend the Summit. Black Keys will be performing; Keynotes from Felix Baumgartner, or Sal Khan (from Khan Academy), and the slopes are nearby if you are a skier or snowboarder ! Register here.
The use of videoconferencing in business has been on the rise over the last few years, but it wasn’t until recently that the Department of Defense (DOD) started heavily pushing for its use in its day-to-day operations. In the past, the DOD’s enterprise collaboration tool, Defense Connect Online (DCO), which is powered by Adobe Connect, had been used primarily to supplement physical conferences.
Recently, Federal Computer Week magazine sat down with our Mike Murtha, who manages the DCO program here at Adobe to discuss the DCO program. Mike reiterated the increased demand by the DOD to use videoconferencing to replace physical meetings and conferences. “Over the past three months, we have gotten a lot of inquiries [saying]: ‘We want to run an entire conference virtually,’” Murtha said.
FCW also discussed barriers that were in place that discouraged the use of videoconferencing such as costs, security concerns, and infrastructure requirements. The article noted that an advantage that Adobe Connect offers is that its services also provide videoconferencing capabilities for both desktops and mobile devices. Mike mentioned that the DCO system wasn’t initially built for videoconferencing, but that the customers are pushing it in that direction.
To read more about how federal agencies are promoting the use of videoconferencing, click here.
