Adobe Connect Blog

Over the past year, recognition continued to roll in for Adobe Connect.  Another great review that came in at the end of 2012 was from Network World.

Network World conducted side-by-side comparisons of eight of the leading Web conferencing vendors and ranked Adobe Connect in a tie for first. The Network World web conferencing vendor test ranked the services according to four scenarios ranging from meetings of two to five people to large scale webinars.

We were excited to see the areas where the review praised Adobe Connect, including the ability to host large-scale webinars calling it a “post-conferencing reporting powerhouse.” Network World also noted “Connect also has the strongest features when it came to measuring audience engagement and supporting archival meeting content.” Other areas where Network World positioned Adobe Connect above other offerings were the recording options available, including the ability to record the chats and participants names, and its mobile client, noting its “consistent user interfaces and clean look.”

In addition, the review discussed persistent URLs for Adobe Connect meeting rooms, calling them “handy when a team is working over a period of time on a set of documents.” As our customers know, this feature is also useful for setting up last-minute, ad hoc meetings.

Another area the review considered was the audio options each service provides. Our own Alistair Lee recently blogged about our Universal Voice feature, which lets users leverage VoIP or their audio provider of choice.

We’re interested in what you have to say, though, after you give the roundup review a read. Let us know what stands out, good and bad, and what you’d like to see more of from us moving forward.

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.

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.