Adobe Connect Blog

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.

Defense Connect Online (DCO), the Adobe Connect and XMPP chat deployment at the US Department of Defense run by the Defense System Information Agency (DISA) has been nominated for 2012 Excellence.Gov awards by the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council.

The charter of the awards is to promote “excellence in advancing the business of government through technology”.  DCO is nominated in the excellence in intergovernmental collaboration. The award recognizes programs that were designed and/or operated with close cooperation and coordination between different levels of government. Examples: social service programs that are funded and overseen by the Federal government but implemented by state and/or local governments; emergency response programs that require cooperation between various governments.

DISA is a combat support agency that plans, engineers, and maintains global net-centric solutions serving a diverse group of autonomously managed United States Department of Defense (DoD) enterprises. These include the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Combatant Commands, and the nation’s military branches.  It launched DCO in 2008 as a collaboration service available to all DoD personel.  Since then hundreds of thousands of users signed up for the service.  DCO supports a large number of operations worldwide ranging from tactical war fighting to day-to-day office use, briefings, mission rehearsals, one-to-one and group on-the-spot collaboration, training, eLearning, and dozens of other functions.

Adobe Connect was selected to power the DCO solution because of its secure architecture and ability to run in a completely secured cloud.  Yet, because of its ease of entry into a meeting, it enables to quickly bring together users from multiple government agencies or even NGOs into a situation room and use that room persistence for both real time and as well as a-synchronous collaboration.

Last summer based on the success of the program, DISA expanded DCO though a $90million dollar contract, possibly the largest contract in the web-conferencing industry.

If you are interested to learn more about DCO, take a look at our case study and or follow DCO on Facebook.

- Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect

Yesterday, at the Enterprise Learning! Conference & Expo, the Best of Elearning! 2011 awards results were announced. Program recognition is significant because nominations and winners are determined by executives and business managers engaged in the areas of enterprise learning and workforce technology.

We’re very pleased that Adobe Connect has been recognized in two categories:

• Best Web Seminar Solution – Winner

 “Nice interface, great performance that allows in-depth learner interactions.”

• Best Virtual Classroom – Winner

Nominations and voting were conducted over a three month balloting period. Given both the quality of competition and quantity of nominations – this year featured 1,750 nominations, covering 56 products across 20 categories – we thank all who took the time to vote and support Adobe Connect!

To read more about the awards and results, please see the press release from the Elearning! Media Group here.

And if you’re not already following us on Twitter, check us out @AdobeConnect.

-Randah McKinnie, Principal Product Manager

Votes have been cast and the results are in – we’re thrilled that Adobe Connect has won both the Best Web Seminar and Best Virtual Classroom categories in this year’s Best of Elearning! awards program.

Best of Elearning! recognition is particularly noteworthy because nominations and winners are entirely determined by the readers of Elearning! magazine – executives and business managers engaged in the areas of enterprise learning and workforce technology.

Nominations and voting were conducted online during August and September. Given both the quality of competition and quantity of nominations – this year featured 1,730 nominations, covering 37 companies and 67 products – we’re thankful to all of you who took the time to vote in support of Adobe Connect!

You can read more about all the award winners, including us, on the Elearning! site here.

And if you’re not already following us on Twitter, check us out @AdobeConnect.

Thrilled to see that the U.S. Department of State has been nominated for an award at Adobe’s annual MAX user conference! The CO.NX project was named a finalist in the public sector category, which recognizes the most innovative use of technology. The U.S. Department of State developed CO.NX to connect U.S. experts with international audiences to better teach the world about the U.S, its policies, and people.
As a tangential aside, Mark Hamill (AKA Luke Skywalker) will be presenting the award in Los Angeles to the winner on October 6.
Please take a minute and vote for CO.NX here: https://www.adobemaxsubmission.com/viewer/?projectid=121.
Congratulations to the entire CO.NX team!

It’s flattering when a customer looks around the web conferencing market and chooses Connect Pro. Even more flattering when 200,000 people do so all at once.
We are thrilled to announce the that US Marine Corp recently selected Connect Pro as their standard across the entire organization to provide deployed troops secure web conferencing and collaboration. The big focus will be to use Connect Pro as a tactical battlefield collaboration tool for deployed troops across locations worldwide, and will used as a part of version 1.5 of the USMC’s Tactical Collaboration Work Suite, a portable data center providing robust, highly available, highly scalable collaboration and hosting capabilities to deployed forces.
The Marine Corps cited several factors for adopting Acrobat Connect Pro as its collaboration solution. In addition to meeting stringent standards for security, availability and quality, the solution is Joint Interoperability and Test Command Certified, so troops and military leaders can connect quickly across any Department of Defense network. Also, because Acrobat Connect Pro simply requires that users have Adobe Flash Player, which is already installed on Department of Defense computers and 98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops, it can be deployed in the field for use in extremely low-bandwidth environments and intermittent connectivity.
For a few years now we’ve been seeing some of the world’s most secure organizations in financial services, life sciences, and government — including the entire U.S. Department of Defense — turn to Connect Pro as their preferred real-time collaboration solution. This is because Connect Pro not only far exceeds the security capabilities of our competitors, but also enables increased efficiency by removing all the technology barriers found in our competitor’s numerous plug-ins, downloads, and system requirements.
Adobe is happy to help the Marine Corps streamline information exchange and keep troops safe in mission-critical deployments.

We’re thrilled to announce that Gartner Research has once again placed Acrobat Connect Pro in the “Leaders” quadrant in their 2009 report on web conferencing. Connect Pro was one of 14 products evaluated for the report with rating criteria including product/service, overall viability, customer experience, market understanding, marketing strategy, product strategy and innovation.
Gartner defines a leader as having:

achieved significant market share while demonstrating their ability to respond to customers’ needs. Leaders have robust, scalable products with a wide range of features, a large installed base, acceptable financial performance and good distribution. Leaders do well today and are prepared for the future.

Some of the key strengths they cited include our robust support for multimedia, lack of compatibly challenges seen in all of our competitors, our success in security with significant wins in regulated industries, government, and defense, and how our service is optimized for rich media without straining a customer’s network.
You can view the full report on our website.

It’s been a great year for 3rd party acknowledgement of what we’ve accomplished with Connect Pro, with another outstanding analyst review. InfoTech Research Group recently published “Vendor Landscape: Web Conferencing; Show Me, Don’t Just Tell Me” on December 17th giving Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro top honors in all four evaluation categories (see page 6 to see for yourself).
Connect Pro was singled out as an optimal choice for eLearning applications, conferencing needs which center around business document collaboration, and sales & marketing presentations and demos. ConnectNow, our entry-level solution, was also highlighted for novice users.
This is on the heels of similar honors from Gartner Research putting Connect Pro in the “Leaders” quadrant for the second year in a row, the Software & Information Industry Association’s 2008 CODIE Award for Best Collaboration Solution, PC Magazine’s Editor’s 2008 Choice award for web conferencing, and Training Media Review’s recent 4-star assessment, all in 2008!

Earlier this week I attended the Masie Learning 2008 conference in Orlando, Florida. Along with just over 1800 other learning professionals across all manner of industries, I did my best to both soak up and contribute to the wealth of knowledge, rich in this community of people passionate about learning. I believe this annual conference is beneficial to the learning professional who resides in the spectrum between the pure HR performance management role, and a technical learning systems or content implementation role.
My own personal takeaways from attendance and participation as a session presenter are these:

Continue reading…

A recent review of Adobe Presenter 7 was posted on the Digital Inspiration blog. Among the soundbites:
“Other than slides, you can add audio narrations, record webcam video or import existing video clips into your presentations. It supports almost every video format from MOV to AVI to 3GB and encodes them internally to Flash video using the On2 FLV encoder.”
“[I]f you aren’t too happy with the default factory settings, no worries – almost everything inside Presenter can be easily customized and branded included the color schemes, fonts, layout, logos and so on.”
“Overall, to call Adobe Presenter as a ‘PowerPoint add-in’ doesn’t do enough justice to the program. It is extremely capable, requires no training and brings Flash output to your existing PowerPoint…”
Check out the full review here:
http://www.labnol.org/software/adobe-presenter-for-powerpoint-review/4438/