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.
Update: Thanks for your interest in our Twitterview originally planned for 11/10. We’re rescheduling to Thursday 11/17 at 11:00am PT. We look forward to the conversation then.
It’s time for the latest in our Adobe Connect web conferencing Twitterview series! If you have questions about Adobe Connect in the world of mobile, including our latest Adobe Connect Mobile apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry PlayBook, our own Principal Product Manager, Randah McKinnie, will be joining us for an exclusive Q & A session. As our resident expert on mobile (as well as eLearning), Randah is a knowledge source you won’t want to miss.
Our previous Twitter-based interviews with Peter Ryce and Alistair Lee offered a fun chance to learn more about the inner workings of Adobe Connect. We’re happy to keep up that tradition, so please join us on November 17th at 11AM Pacific time.
If you’re new to Adobe Connect or our Twitterviews, the process is simple: On 11/17, contact us via Twitter: @reply our AdobeConnect account and include the hashtag #AdobeConnect. Randah will jump in on any questions, comments, or thoughts you might have regarding Adobe Connect.
Again, join us on Twitter, Thursday 11/17 from 11 – 11:30 a.m. PST and be sure to include the #AdobeConnect hashtag when you tweet @AdobeConnect. If you can’t make it, please leave your question in the comments section of this post or send us a message on Twitter in advance and Randah will be sure to answer. Thanks for tuning in!
Today, we’ve begun upgrading customers using the hosted version of our product to Adobe Connect 8 Service Pack 2 (SP2). If you have an on-premise or managed service deployment, this upgrade is available today as well, and your account administrator will be provided with additional information on how to access it. For customers already on version 8.1, SP2 will provide several key product enhancements to help improve user experience.
Adobe Connect hosted customers will be upgraded to Adobe Connect 8 SP2 per our migration schedule. For information on the timing of your upgrade, please visit our migration center here. On the right-hand side of the page, mid-way down you can enter your Adobe Connect meeting URL and learn more about when your server is expected to be migrated.
Adobe Connect 8 SP2 enhancements include:
Customizable display of attendee information
In Adobe Connect 8 SP2, account administrators will have greater control over how attendee names and information are displayed in the meeting environment (attendee pod, chat pod, share pod, etc.). Attendee information can be customized to display profile information such as location, title, rank, and any other supplemental information that exists for users. This helps enable meeting hosts and presenters to quickly know who they are sharing information with, understand audience demographics at a glance, and segregate information sharing in meetings more effectively.
In-product notification enhancements
Adobe Connect 8 SP2 can enable account administrators to create their own in-product notifications and immediately notify all end users on the account with any information that they want to broadcast. Hosted customers will continue to receive critical in-product notifications from Adobe as well.
Ubuntu Linux 10.04 64-bit Add-in now available
Adobe Connect now supports hosts and presenters using Ubuntu Linux 10.04 64-bit OS with a new Meeting Add-In. This Add-in is not required for Adobe Connect 8 SP2 and is completely optional. The Add-in can be downloaded here.
We hope that you will enjoy these enhancements in Adobe Connect 8 SP2. Please check out our migration center for additional information and to look up the expected timing of your upgrade.
As always, we look forward to your thoughts or comments here and on Twitter @AdobeConnect and @ConnectSupport.
Thanks to everyone who joined in or watched our recent AdobeConnect Twitterview! Our own Alistair Lee was on hand to answer your questions live via Twitter. If you didn’t get a chance to tune in, or are looking for more Adobe Connect information, take a look at the recap below. Let us know if you have any more questions for Alistair, or ask him directly on his Twitter account @AlistairLee!
Be sure to follow the @AdobeConnect Twitter account for more updates on our next Twitter event!
We’re thrilled to share a glimpse behind the Adobe Connect curtain with everyone by giving you an opportunity to chat directly with our team via Twitter! Our previous Twitter-based interview with Peter Ryce was such a fun experience that we couldn’t resist letting more team members in on the act. Please welcome Senior Product Enablement Manager Alistair Lee! He’ll be joining us on August 18th at 10AM Pacific time.
If you’ve never heard of a Twitterview, or just haven’t joined us before, it is an opportunity for you to get to know the people behind Adobe Connect as well as get your most burning questions answered. On 8/18, hop on your Twitter account and either @reply our AdobeConnect account or include the hashtag #AdobeConnect: from there, Alistair will be happy to answer your questions!
Alistair is one of our foremost Adobe Connect experts. If you’re not already familiar with his engaging YouTube videos or tweets, he will be happy to introduce himself as well as provide some answers on the latest Adobe Connect updates, mobile topics, and our increasingly popular extensions capabilities.
Again, join us on Twitter Thursday 8/18 from 10 – 10:30 a.m. PST and be sure to include the #AdobeConnect hashtag when you tweet @AdobeConnect to get our attention. If you don’t have time, or a Twitter account, just leave your questions in the comment section below! We’ll make sure they’re answered by Alistair as well. Thanks again for joining us and spreading the word!
Alistair Lee
Thanks to everyone who joined us yesterday for our Adobe Connect Support Spotlight. Our own Amy Brooks and her team are always happy to provide their expertise and knowledge through the @ConnectSupport handle. If you missed it, please take a look at the team’s answers to some of the most frequently asked questions surrounding Adobe Connect. Thanks!
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The mLearnCon conference is over for 2011. I’m sitting in my electronic bubble at SFO, headphones playing Josh Radin, almost succeeding in drowning out a group of elementary school cricket players running wild on the other side of the gate.
This year’s mLearnCon conference, hosted by the eLearning Guild, and attended and delivered by both new and venerable elearning professionals, has left me in a buzzing yet reflective state. As after every eLearning conference I’ve attended, my cerebral factory is in fifth gear, cranking out widgets.
I attended the conference to both impart and collect information. The collecting part always wins; if that ever stops being the case then I’ve stopped learning or listening, both of which are key to staying relevant in the software world, so I’ll continue to do my best at both. My outcome from this year’s mLearnCon was a mix: what I thought I knew was reinforced, and best of all, new perspectives were born.
What was reinforced is that the eLearning Guild community is rich with people who are working hard to meet their training mandates, entice and engage a sometimes challenging or reluctant learning audience, and keep up with technology. As always, we need to do all this with diminishing budgets, small teams, and executives who don’t always ‘get’ the symbiotic relationship between learning and technology. eLearning professionals continue to be a passionate group, challenging old paradigms and pushing for what’s new to also be purposeful and relevant to our learners.
The new perspective I gained was that more than any medium shift since electronic learning began, learning on mobile devices changes the game. This new, personal, everywhere delivery medium is challenging long-held metaphors of learning and information delivery.
Things have changed even since last year’s first annual mLearnCon conference. A year ago questions of relevance pervaded. Will mobile learning catch on? Does mobile learning really apply to my organization? Should I choose just one or two devices and limit delivery to those alone? This year the questions are different. How do I meet the permeating demand for learning content on mobile devices? How will I ever keep up with this demand, and deliver content to the wealth of devices and mobile operating systems in the hands of my learners?
The great news is this: mobile learners are voracious. They love having information in their pocket, and they are begging for more. The challenge: they expect mobile offerings to be available in their hands right now.
At mLearn I was impressed to see that some companies are already meeting the demand. They’ve jumped into the fray, run limited pilots on limited device sets, developed content with custom tools, and they have been successful. They need a better way, though, because the pilot projects are over and the demand is even higher. While these trailblazers were making one or two small groups of users happy on their BlackBerry smartphones, thousands of others bought a new XOOM, an iPad, a Droid X, or a PlayBook (to name only a few), and those learners want in on the game.
My mLearnCon take-away as a product manager at Adobe is that the direction we are heading with eLearning is going to simplify some of these challenges, and accelerate the delivery of quality content to multiple screens. One of the biggest problems and outstanding questions continues to be delivering content to devices: content that will work, will look good, and will run across devices; content that will communicate with a secure server, as an extension of current learning management systems, and provide the data needed to track the mobile audience as well as keep track of desktop learners today. That content needs to be engaging and memorable, and it needs to work in the context of the learner. We are bringing learning to people who are on the go, on the move, in need of an update now, or who want to fill formerly ‘wasted’ moments with a purposeful activity. If I can spend my 5 minutes in line at Peet’s Coffee learning something I didn’t know about a topic relevant to me, I will keep coming back for more.
This is the work we have ahead of us as an eLearning community, and as a product group here at Adobe. Our research and development is heading in this direction, and I hope to see my cerebral widgets come to life in a tappable, swipe-able app one day soon. The Adobe eLearning development teams understand the pain that this exciting new learning modality brings to the creation and delivery of training and knowledge transfer, and we are working to make it simple to add mobile learning to your portfolio. When we do, the next Android, iOS, BlackBerry, or other device and OS update will not cause a challenge, or dictate an expensive new development project, but will be checked off as just one more screen in the ecosystem of your training programs.
In a post on our blog earlier this week, we asked what you wish your web conferencing solution could do. Not surprisingly, you had a lot of great (and in some cases quite funny) suggestions, which we appreciate and take to heart. Thanks again to all who participated. We’ve gathered a set of our favorite responses to the contest question in the Storify post further below. Please do check it out.
As we mentioned in that earlier post, respondents who followed @AdobeConnect and included the #AdobeConnect hashtag with their “wish” were entered into a random drawing for a 4-month Adobe Connect subscription. And we’d like to congratulate our winner, @kalarson, whom we’ve reached out to directly on Twitter.
Finally, keep in mind that although no web conferencing solution on the market can currently do everything we heard from you…and in some cases may never – like automatically ordering donuts for attendees 
…Adobe Connect is the most extensible product on the market. By that we mean developers can create just about any type of custom functionality that integrates into our solution to extend its capabilities. If you weren’t aware of that, we invite you to check out the cool and useful extensions (such as the TwitterConnect pod) from Adobe and our partners on the Adobe Connect Exchange. Extensions are built leveraging our Collaboration Builder SDK.
Ever found yourself wishing your online meetings and webinars were easier to use, more efficient, more effective, unique in some way, or just plain more fun? What do you wish your web conferencing solution could do? That’s the question we’re asking you!
Starting today, June 6th and running through this Friday June 10th, we’re kicking off a Twitter contest asking for your ideas on the best extras, extensions and enhancements that a web conference could use. Even if you’ve never run an online meeting, you’ve almost certainly participated in one or more in your time. So take a few moments to consider and let us know what you think…
What do you wish your web conferencing solution could do?
Share your answer with us via Twitter, by 1) following us @AdobeConnect and 2) including the #AdobeConnect hashtag! Comments on this blog post will also be entered into our random drawing, but you’ll need to be an @AdobeConnect follower on Twitter, as well, to win.
With those things in mind, respondents will be eligible to win our prize, a 4-month Adobe Connect subscription (or a $100 giftcard, if the winner is already an Adobe Connect user)! The winner will be chosen by random drawing and will be announced on this blog June 13th.
Looking for some inspiration? Then check out the Adobe Connect Exchange, where you’ll find some very cool and useful extensions to our own solution built with the Collaboration Builder SDK.
The contest opens 10 a.m. PT, Monday, June 6, 2011, and closes 5 p.m. PT, Friday, June 10, 2011. The prize drawing will occur on or before 5 p.m., June 13, 2011. The drawing is open to residents in North America only.
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.
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