Adobe Connect Blog

Guillaume Privat | Director, Adobe Connect

Today, I’m extremely pleased to announce the next major release of Adobe Connect, Adobe Connect 9.  It will change the way people’s perspective on web conferencing.

This new version of Adobe Connect brings with it features that will help our customers produce even better webinars and collaborate and train even more effectively using mobile devices.

Adobe Connect 9 also leverages industry-leading technologies from other parts of the company to help provide end to end solutions that spans business process that happens before the meeting and after the meeting.

We worked with the Adobe CQ team to build in capabilities that will enable our customers to create rich, branded event landing pages or entire micro-sites that can be used for event promotion and registration.

Adobe SiteCatalyst provides web analytics for some of the biggest brands and websites in the world. We’re leveraging that same engine in Adobe Connect 9 to help our customers measure the success of their webinars and marketing or outreach campaigns.

We’re even able to provide real-time feedback inside of a webinar or virtual classroom with a new pod called the Engagement Dashboard. This dashboard helps presenters and hosts track message effectiveness.

In addition to Adobe Connect 9, we’re also announcing the next version of Adobe Connect Mobile. Version 2 brings with it even more support for meeting hosts to manage the meeting, share documents, and annotate on whiteboards or content. It also increases support for virtual classrooms – incorporating breakout rooms, raise-hand functionality, and many sharing options. There is no longer the need for a traditional PC; Adobe Connect Mobile 2.0 enables device to device collaboration.

With Adobe Connect 9 and Adobe Mobile 2.0, we are powering the use of web conferencing in mission critical business processes across organizations.

Last week, I published a sneak peek showing you some incredible new features that will enable customers to build landing pages to register participants for their events. I’ve seen some stunning examples and these features are largely powered by Adobe CQ5.

It’s not the whole story though. When we spoke to customers about the workflow for their marketing webinars and other events, they spoke about the need to measure the success of these events. Getting people to your event is one part of the equation – analyzing the data after the event is another.

It turns out that Adobe is already an industry leader in web-based analytics through it’s acquisition of Omniture in 2009. In this sneak peek, I’ll show you how a future version of Adobe Connect can leverage Adobe SiteCatalyst to help customers analyze their events and qualify leads.

Adobe Connect has a huge number of features dedicated to helping hosts and presenters engage with their attendees. The use of polls can help capture information and guide the flow of a webinar. Chat and Q&A provide a tremendous amount of interactivity that helps differentiate a live session from an on-demand recording. Custom pods can do just about anything – including entertain and engage.

In this sneak peek, I look at a new pod under development that can help a presenter or host understand the level of engagement in their webinar or virtual classroom. Providing realtime feedback can help hosts optimize the experience for every participant.

One of the many things I’ve learned on the Adobe Connect team is that there’s a lot more to a webinar than the live event itself. How do you promote your event? How do you register unknown users for the event? How do you handle email for invitations, updates, and follow ups? How do measure success?

Adobe Connect uses the ‘Events’ module for all of these functions. While it’s always been functional, it seems most of the emphasis has been on the live event and not some of the other activities.

In this sneak peek, I take a look at some technology we’re working on to help customers create stunning registration pages for their events.

Stay tuned for more.

I’m terrible at keeping secrets. The toughest secrets to keep are often the new features that engineering is working on for future versions of Adobe Connect. Some of these features are incredibly exciting my first instinct is to want to tell everyone about them.

Usually, I’m not able to do that. I’m very glad to say that – beginning with this blog post – I’m going to start showing some ‘sneak peeks’ at some of the features that you might see in a future version of Adobe Connect.

In this first video post, I’m going to highlight some of the new features around editing recordings. I’ve always felt we had the best recordings in the business because they retained their interactivity. Instead of just showing a video of the meeting, Adobe Connect would replay the full experience using live controls. This enabled customers to search an index for a specific slide or section, to scroll up and down the chat or Q&A pod, and even to participate in a quiz or other interactive element of the meeting.

In the video below, I’ll look at how this interactivity might further benefit our customers by adding even more functionality to the recording index and giving customers the ability to edit more than just the timeline.

Stay tuned for more sneak peeks.

Big name universities. Big research. Big data. Big brains. Big collaboration?

I had the honor to attend the Internet2 conference in the nation’s capital last week. I was there to help announce the new Adobe Connect Managed Services offering that will be available soon as an Internet2 NET+ service (www.internet2.edu/netplus). We on the Adobe Connect team are thrilled to be a part of this community and the great achievements its members will undoubtedly produce.

At its most basic, Internet2 provides a high speed, private network to its members. But that doesn’t even begin to explain the capabilities of this network, the security and reliability its members will enjoy, and the power of bringing together communities that are some of the most brilliant researchers, scientists, and scholars on our globe. The founders of this initiative say it better than Ido, so take a look at the introduction to the Internet2 networking consortium on their web site: www.internet2.edu.

Think Hadron Collider today. Think the cure for cancer tomorrow. Never before had it occurred to me to stop to consider the amount of computation, throughput, and storage power that would be required to support such complex initiatives. Until now, realtime collaboration at such a scale was next to impossible. The security restrictions alone could make collaboration challenging at best. With membership in Internet2, research, education, and industry institutions have access to some of the fastest, most secure networks on the globe. Using Internet2 Net+ services to collaborate – including Adobe Connect meetings and virtual classrooms – members can share private and secure virtual lab space, classrooms, project rooms, and more.

With boundaries removed, teamwork and knowledge sharing will only increase. We can’t begin to imagine what the big-brained, big data, Internet2 community will achieve next over ‘big collaboration’.

by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect 

Two weeks ago, I attended the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco.    It was a very interesting event that touched upon a lot of subjects from how to set-up sales compensation, to boosting sales rep motivation, to what CRM, lead management, analytics system companies should consider implementing.

What stroke me though was how prevalent virtual meetings and webinars have become for sales and marketing organizations to engage with their prospective customers.  Webconferencing has become mission critical to ensure sales rep can talk to prospects, to ensure marketing organization can generate leads via webinars.

Yet many organizations struggle to engage customers virtually.  Their presentation are very bland consisting mostly of voice over screen share and quickly lose the audience to multi-tasking and going back to checking email.

I was particularly interested by a presentation by Carmen Taran from Rexi Media called “Virtual Presentations Can Make or Break You”.  Carmen provided some tips on how to re-engage your audience every 2 minutes – as studies have found this is the most attention span you get from people these days.  Here is what she advocates:

1) vary the type of content frequently: don’t just present slides that follows the same format.  Vary template, add demo, video, simulation, quizzes, games.

2) use intriguing pictures instead of  words to capture the audience attention and force them to listen for the solution of the riddle set in the picture.

3) create emotional connection with the audience, though story or picture.

Adobe Connect offer unsurpassed rich experience to create this emotional engagement with an audience and I was not surprised to see Adobe Connect screen shots in Carmen’s presentation.   We also have a lot of best practices for engaging audience at our community site, www.connectusers.com.

I was pleased this morning to see a tweet from the CODiE Awards (@CODiEAwards) congratulating Adobe Connect (@AdobeConnect) on becoming a finalist in the Best Collaboration/Social Networking Solution category for the CODiE Awards.

Congrats @AdobeConnect – 2012 #SIIA CODiE Awards finalist in Best Collaboration/Social Networking Solution #CODiE12 #AATC

— CODiE Awards (@CODiEAwards) April 11, 2012

I spend a large part of my day in Adobe Connect meetings conducting business with the rest of my team and colleagues in regions all around the world, so it was particularly gratifying to see web conferencing technology recognized for the efficiencies it brings to collaboration.

In fact, Adobe Connect has been getting quite a bit of recognition from the industry lately. The product was recently honored as part of the Brandon Hall Excellence in Technology Awards in the Technology for Virtual Classroom Training or Conferencing category.

We were also included on a list of the top applications for the Mac by PC Magazine. And PC Magazine has recognized the product in the past, as well, with its Editors Choice rating for Adobe Connect 8.

We’re continuing to innovate and look forward to sharing more with you as we go…as always, please stay tuned and in touch.

by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect Business Unit

In 2011, Adobe Connect reached a remarkable milestone.  We delivered more than 3 billion minutes on our hosted platform.  This number would be even bigger if we could add the usage numbers from our large on-premise user base.

This is no surprise.  Year after year, we have observed that organizations that deploy Adobe Connect experience exponential usage growth compared to any previous solution that they have deployed before.  Most credit the ease of use, the persistence of the meeting room which allows for synchronous / a-synchronous collaboration and the development of remote learning, triggered by all the learner engagement features provided by Adobe Connect.

In addition, we have seen a rapid adoption of our mobile application on iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod), Android or QNX (Blackberry Playbook).  In 2011, accesses from mobile devices are more than double accesses from Linux or Unix based platform and quickly progressing.

We are set to continue this growth trend in 2012 with exciting upcoming new releases, Adobe Connect 9 and new versions of our mobile applications to further enable tablet to tablet collaboration.

Last week, more than 69,000 people pledged to telework as a part of “Telework Week 2012”. The result: More than $5.5 million saved and 3,358 tons of pollutants removed from the air. It’s no argument the positive impact that teleworking has on the environment, but what about the impact on individuals and companies?

Studies show that employees who work remotely feel a better sense of personal freedom, flexibility and work-life balance. The option to work from home is also a big draw for job seekers. For companies, telecommuting expands the talent pool, reduces the spread of illness, reduces costs, and increases productivity.

With the right tools and technologies, the benefits of teleworking seem limitless. Advancements in Web conferencing solutions like Adobe Connect have made it easier for globally dispersed teams to communicate effectively. Trainings, workshops and classes can easily be given and taken online, and organizations can effortlessly deliver presentations to employees, customers and partners – no matter where they are in the world. In addition to Web conferencing; social networking, IM and traditional e-mail continue to be the preferred forms of communication for teleworkers.

Bottom line: remote employees can just as easily, if not better, collaborate, complete work faster, and drive better results.

Next week, we’ll be examining specific tips and tricks on how to make the most out of working remotely. Are you a teleworker? If so, what benefits and drawbacks do you experience? If you do not work remotely, would you consider participating in Telework Week next year?