Adobe Connect Blog

by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect Business Unit

Yesterday, Apple launched the new iPad.  Yet another technical marvel from the Cupertino firm.  What I found the most interesting is from the launch presentation was some of the numbers Tim Cook unveiled.  One statistics in particular: 15.4 million iPads sold last quarter, which is more than the number of PCs sold by any single PC maker in that quarter.

It is clear that Tablet are fast becoming the computing device of choice of many knowledge workers.  Yet until now, most web conferencing vendors assumed that people would use tablet just to consume meeting from their device.  Not to run meetings.  With the increasing adoption of tablets, it is clear that customers will expect to do tablet to tablet collaboration.

As a result, when assessing web conferencing solutions, decision makers should consider not only whether you can attend a meeting, a webinar or a virtual classroom from a tablet, but most importantly, can you host a meeting from a tablet and collaborate tablet to tablet.

If your webconferencing solution supports only screen sharing, it is not going to work on tablet.  No tablet operating system supports screen sharing today and it is not clear that it is in the roadmap of any.  Most importantly, the overall user experience of multi-tasking on the tablet does note lend itself well to screen sharing.  As a result it is clear that most collaboration will happen on up-loaded documents.

Uploading documents into a meeting space is not straightforward.  Many solutions convert your powerpoint file into a viewable format by running processes locally on your desktop (often calling Microsoft Powerpoint executables).  This mode of conversion is no longer available on the tablet, so the conversion needs to happen in the cloud.

If you are evaluating a web conferencing vendor an plan to use the solution for table to tablet collaboration, you should make sure that:

1) they offer other sharing options than screen sharing and

2) that their document conversion upload is server based (and does not occur locally).

Adobe Connect supports screen sharing and document upload for multiple format.  All our conversion is server based and does not require mandatory client side conversion.

Our Adobe Connect Mobile 1.7 application enable not only to attend meetings, but also virtual classrooms or seminars.  It enables user also to host a classroom, a meeting or a webinar.  Our mobile 2.0 currently in beta will enable you to do much more and provide a great tablet to tablet meeting experience.

Can not wait to run my next Adobe Connect meeting on the new iPad !

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

Thanks for joining our Twitterview with Randah McKinnie yesterday. If you didn’t have a chance to attend or ask a question, please find below a recap of the entire Q & A session. Randah was able to answer a series of questions on recent Adobe Connect Mobile updates and announcements.

If you have any additional questions or are interested in our next event, keep following this blog or find us on Twitter @AdobeConnect.

Following the significant recent updates to our Adobe Connect Mobile web conferencing apps for Android and the BlackBerry PlayBook, we’re excited to announce Adobe Connect Mobile 1.7.5 for Apple iOS is now available!

Featuring new rich hosting capabilities, improved video quality, and an updated UI and improved navigation for greater flexibility and ease of use—Adobe Connect Mobile 1.7.5 lets users host and participate in mobile conferences anytime, anywhere.

Control meeting access, permissions and activities from your mobile device

• Meeting hosts can:
  • Start and end meetings
  • Accept or deny guests from entering meetings
  • Enable or disable participant’s ability to broadcast their cameras and audio (VoIP)
  • Promote or demote user roles to and from Host, Presenter, and Participant
  • Remove users from meetings
  • Control all active pods
  • Start and stop content and screen sharing
  • Create and edit content in the Notes pod
  • Advance slides and animations (capability available to both Presenters and Hosts)

Enhanced user interface for even greater ease of use and control

• New layout and controls allow meeting attendees to more easily:
  • View all activity happening in the meeting at once
  • Focus on an activity to enter input in Public Chat, Private Chat, and Polls

Check out this demo to see some of the new features:

Adobe Connect Mobile 1.7.5 is now available for free download; check it out on iTunes Preview here. The app supports:

• iPhone 3GS with iOS 4 or higher
• iPhone 4 with iOS 4 or higher
• iPod Touch 3^rd and 4^th generation with iOS 4 or higher
• iPad and iPad 2 with iOS 4 or higher

For more information on Adobe Connect Mobile visit our Adobe Connect Mobile User Forum on connectusers.com.

We look forward to your thoughts—in comments, on Twitter @AdobeConnect, and on our mobile user forum.

Cheers,

Randah McKinnie, Principal Product Manager

The world of web conferencing is evolving. Quickly.

While many think of web conferencing as simple screen sharing — sharing PowerPoint and “passing the ball” from one presenter to the next—that’s a limited interaction that hasn’t changed much in 10 years.

In contrast, we’re seeing organizations expanding what they’re doing and what they expect from online meeting solutions. Beyond simple screen sharing, they’re enabling more effective collaboration, supporting a range of use cases throughout their enterprises, and in some cases, managing highly specialized interactions such as guided selling, telemedicine and cross-border disaster recovery coordination – to name a few.

We’re glad to be right there with them, helping support and lead this movement toward a broad and rapidly growing range of more advanced use cases. We’ve taken an open approach with our product development over time and focused efforts on creating a rich, flexible solution that integrates well with other systems and is highly extensible. Our APIs, free SDKs and other developer resources encourage development and enable customization. We encourage you to read on for more about our perspective on extensibility, our ecosystem that’s growing around it, what a few of our customers have accomplished, and how you can get your hands on the latest and greatest.

Market Trend – Customization

In this video, Arun Anantharaman, our VP and GM of Adobe Connect (@arunster), discusses overarching trends in web conferencing including increasing demands for customization and solutions that integrate with other systems.

Extensions Ecosystem

We’ve built out a unique extensions ecosystem. Looking at the image below, dark blue represents areas where ours is the only solution that provides such extensions, and light blue where we’re one of few that offer the capabilities. Several vendors, including Adobe, provide integrations to other systems and mobile support.

We’ve divided extensions into seven groups:

• Integrations:  integrations with audio, CRM, chat, learning management and other systems
• Custom Meeting Pods: specialized, in-meeting applications; either pre-built or custom
• Custom Solutions: end-to-end solutions — e.g., guided selling, telemedicine
• Deployment: managed, single tenant version of Adobe Connect offered via Amazon cloud
• Video Teleconferencing: integration with several video-teleconferencing systems
• Mobile Devices: support for mobility platforms — e.g., iOS, Android, Blackberry PlayBook
• Adobe Technologies: utilization of Adobe technologies including Flash and AIR

For more information and to download the very latest, see our extensions and integrations page here.

Customer Uses

The extensibility of Adobe Connect is a direct response to the real-world requirements of customers — the need to solve unique business problems, and to have personalized experiences. Here are a few great examples:

• The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency, uses Adobe Connect and a specialized extension from our partner, RefinedData to support simultaneous interpretation, allowing multi-lingual, interactive remote online meeting participation; see their press release

• The California State University Chancellor’s Office has standardized on Adobe Connect and in-meeting extensions to improve collaboration with rich video and save travel expense while lightening environmental impact; check out their story here

• A high-profile political event recently incorporated our TwitterConnect custom pod in its Adobe Connect large-scale webinar solution to include conversation with supporters and elevate community building

Developers

The Adobe Connect Developer Center has the free SDKs, APIs and learning materials developers need to get started extending capabilities; additional resources include tutorials and a forum.

Looking Forward

We have many customers using Adobe Connect in conjunction with key extensions to realize value today. And we’re definitely looking forward to what the creativity of developers and our customers brings to bear as we move forward. Please do stay in touch.

Best regards,

-Michael Londgren, Director, Product Marketing, Adobe Connect (@MichaelLondgren)

-Peter Ryce, Senior Technical Evangelist, Adobe Connect (@PeterRyce)

Hot on the heels of our post earlier this week about the latest version of our app for Android, we’re pleased to share that Adobe Connect Mobile 1.7 is now available for BlackBerry PlayBook! You might recall we launched the initial version of this web conferencing app earlier this year and discussed it here.

Similar to our Android app, Adobe Connect Mobile for BlackBerry PlayBook now includes for the first time rich hosting capabilities, as well as enhanced video quality, an update to the user interface and improved navigation for added flexibility and ease of use.

Adobe Connect Mobile 1.7 provides users more complete confidence to host and participate in mobile conferencing anytime, anywhere:

Control meeting access from your mobile device

• The host can:
• Start and end meetings
• Accept or deny guests from entering meetings
• Enable or disable participant’s ability to broadcast their cameras and audio (VoIP)
• Promote or demote user roles to and from Host, Presenter, and Participant
• Remove users from meetings
• Control all active pods
• Start and stop content and screen sharing
• Create and edit content in the Notes pod
• Advance slides and animations (capability available to both Presenters and Hosts)

Enhanced user interface for ease of use, control

• New layout and controls allow meeting attendees to more easily:
• View all activity happening in the meeting at once
• Focus on an activity to enter input in Public Chat, Private Chat, and Polls

Adobe Connect Mobile 1.7 is available here in BlackBerry App World. Adobe AIR 2.7 or later is required.

Remember, we also have an Adobe Connect Mobile application for Apple iOS devices. You can find version 1.5 on iTunes Preview here. It will be updated soon to version 1.7, so stay tuned to our blog and @AdobeConnect.

For more information, visit our Adobe Connect Mobile User Forum on connectusers.com.

Please stay in touch with us in comments and on Twitter, and enjoy the app!

-Randah McKinnie, Principal Product Manager

Peter Ryce, our Adobe Connect evangelist (@peterryce), joined us for our first Twitterview Thursday morning, along with many of you…which we greatly appreciated. The questions were plentiful and certainly demonstrated – as expected – your very strong grasp of Adobe Connect, several of the things on your mind about the product, as well as what you’d like to see moving forward.

If you missed it, or are just interested in a great source of Adobe Connect knowledge, please take a look at our recap below. It covers each question Peter addressed during the Twitterview. Ultimately, we had more questions than time allowed Peter to answer, so we hope you’ll take us up on the offer to share another Twitterview soon.

And we didn’t forget: each participant who asked a question during the Twitterview was entered in a random drawing to win a $50 gift card to Amazon (North America residents only). Congratulations to the winner, JillianLillian! We’ll be contacting you shortly to deliver your prize.

Thanks again to Peter Ryce and all of you who made this Twitterview such a great conversation. We look forward to the next one! In the meantime, keep in touch with us via this blog and follow @AdobeConnect for the latest Adobe Connect updates and activities.

Over the past several months, we’ve had a lot of great conversations with many of you via social channels discussing all aspects of Adobe Connect. We’re excited to continue that ad hoc conversation, of course, but also thought it would be a great time to set up our first Twitterview so we have a focused set of time you can ask and we can answer any and all questions about the product. For those unfamiliar with a Twitterview, it gives you a chance (in real time and over Twitter) to be the interviewer and us to be the interviewee. Join in and you’ll be entered for a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift certificate (North America residents only)! You simply need a Twitter account…and some creativity to point your best questions, including the #AdobeConnect hashtag, @AdobeConnect in 140 characters or less.

You’re officially invited to join us on Twitter Thursday, May 12, from 10:00 – 10:30 a.m. PST, when our Adobe Connect evangelist and resident expert, Peter Ryce, will host the session. Peter is responsible for Adobe Connect customer education and outreach.  He’s a true expert on the product with a background in several areas like product management, channel support, sales training, and product marketing. He also works to ensure that our own employees best incorporate Adobe Connect into their day-to-day work lives.

So, have you been up at night wondering how to incorporate a Twitter feed into you next Adobe Connect webinar, if it’s possible to attend a web meeting on-the-go from your favorite smartphone or tablet, whether it’s best for you to deploy the product on premise or as a hosted or managed service, or why Peter claims Adobe Connect is the most extensible web conferencing solution and why exactly that’s important? Now’s your chance.

Again, join us on Twitter Thursday 5/12 from 10 – 10:30 a.m. PST and be sure to include the #AdobeConnect hashtag when you tweet @AdobeConnect to get our attention. Also, feel free to ask questions right now in comments to this post or at our Twitter handle with the aforementioned hashtag; we’ll line up answers to them and include as part of the Twitterview.  Again, all Twitterview participants who ask a question and include the hashtag will be entered into a random drawing for a $50 Amazon gift card (North America residents only). So, if you’ve ever had an Adobe Connect question to ask, send it our way!

Our only other request: if you know of others at your company, agency or institution who may want to ask something burning or just follow the Twitter stream to catch a new idea, please feel free to extend our very open invitation.

Cheers!

If you’ve been following us here and on Twitter, you know we’ve recently pushed out significant updates of our Adobe Connect Mobile web conferencing app for Android and the BlackBerry PlayBook. We’ve mentioned in the posts introducing them that a new version of our app for Apple iOS devices was coming, as well—and based on feedback we’ve received via our social channels, we know many of you have been waiting. With that in mind, we’re excited to announce Adobe Connect Mobile 1.5 for Apple iOS is now available!

This is the first version of the app to be optimized for iPad, something in particular we know has been anticipated. With this version, which also includes enhancements you’ll appreciate on the iPhone and iPod Touch, we’re providing users a far more complete mobile conferencing experience. With an entirely updated user interface, you’ll feel more like a full meeting participant and can interact in many of the same ways as someone on a desktop system, with the added benefit and convenience of a touch screen.

Some of the cool features of the app include:

Two-way Video

• Participate in multi-point video conferencing and add your own upstream video broadcast to the conversation.
  • Adobe Connect Mobile for iOS supports the rear- and forward-facing cameras of the iPad 2 and iPhone 4. The app detects that the device has two cameras and provides the option to use one or the other, and also to switch cameras at any time while broadcasting.

Meeting Overview and Focus View Options

• In Meeting Overview, watch all the activities happening in the meeting at once.
• Tap or navigate to focus in on any one meeting activity like the slide presentation or screen share.
• Focus on an activity to enter your input in Chat, Private Chat, and Polls.
• While in Focus View, instant notifications help you stay current with off-screen activities that may need your attention, like new or private chat messages. Tap to focus on new activities directly from these notifications.

Check out this video to see the app in action, including several of the features I’ve described.

Adobe Connect Mobile 1.5 is now available for free download; check it out on iTunes Preview here. The app supports:

• iPhone 3GS with iOS 4 or higher*
• iPhone 4 with iOS 4 or higher*
• iPod Touch 3^rd generation with iOS 4 or higher*
• iPad and iPad 2 with iOS 4 or higher*

(*Applies to later versions released as of the date of this posting)

For more information on Adobe Connect Mobile, as well as user commentary, visit our Adobe Connect Mobile User Forum on connectusers.com.

Let us know what you think—in comments, on Twitter @AdobeConnect, and on our mobile user forum.

Cheers,

Randah McKinnie, Principal Product Manager

On the heels of my recent post about the latest version of our app for Android, I’m excited to introduce Adobe Connect Mobile for the new BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Adobe Connect Mobile 1.5 is one of a series of Adobe AIR applications coming to the BlackBerry PlayBook at launch and in the months that follow.

Similar to our latest app for Android, Adobe Connect Mobile for BlackBerry PlayBook gives the tablet user complete confidence to participate in mobile conferencing from anywhere. Tablet users will feel like full meeting participants, and can interact in many of the same ways as someone on a desktop system with the added benefit and convenience of a touch screen.

Some of the key, cool features of the web conferencing app include:

Two-way Video

• Participate in multi-point video conferencing and add your own upstream video broadcast to the conversation.
• Adobe Connect Mobile for BlackBerry PlayBook supports the tablet’s rear- and forward-facing cameras. The app detects that the device has two cameras and provides the option to use one or the other, and also to switch cameras at any time while broadcasting.

Meeting Overview and Focus View Options

• In Meeting Overview, watch all the activities happening in the meeting at once.
• Tap or navigate to focus in on any one meeting activity like the slide presentation or screen share.
• Focus on an activity to enter your input in Chat, Private Chat, and Polls.
• While in Focus View, instant notifications help you stay current with off-screen activities that may need your attention, like new or private chat messages. Tap to focus on new activities directly from these notifications.

Check out this video to see me demo Adobe Connect Mobile for BlackBerry PlayBook, including several of the features I’ve described.

Adobe Connect Mobile 1.5 is available for download via BlackBerry App World. Adobe AIR 2.6 (or later) is required.

Remember that in addition to apps for BlackBerry PlayBook and Android we also have an Adobe Connect Mobile application for Apple iOS devices. You can find version 1.0.5 on iTunes Preview here. The app will be updated to version 1.5, so please stay tuned to us on this blog and Twitter.

For more information on the Adobe Connect Mobile client, as well as user commentary, visit our Adobe Connect Mobile User Forum on connectusers.com.

We’re always interested to hear from you, so let us know your thoughts in comments, on Twitter @AdobeConnect, and on our mobile user forum.

Cheers,
Randah McKinnie, Principal Product Manager