Adobe Connect Blog

The use of videoconferencing in business has been on the rise over the last few years, but it wasn’t until recently that the Department of Defense (DOD) started heavily pushing for its use in its day-to-day operations. In the past, the DOD’s enterprise collaboration tool, Defense Connect Online (DCO), which is powered by Adobe Connect, had been used primarily to supplement physical conferences.

Recently, Federal Computer Week magazine sat down with our Mike Murtha, who manages the DCO program here at Adobe to discuss the DCO program. Mike reiterated the increased demand by the DOD to use videoconferencing to replace physical meetings and conferences. “Over the past three months, we have gotten a lot of inquiries [saying]: ‘We want to run an entire conference virtually,’” Murtha said.

FCW also discussed barriers that were in place that discouraged the use of videoconferencing such as costs, security concerns, and infrastructure requirements. The article noted that an advantage that Adobe Connect offers is that its services also provide videoconferencing capabilities for both desktops and mobile devices. Mike mentioned that the DCO system wasn’t initially built for videoconferencing, but that the customers are pushing it in that direction.

To read more about how federal agencies are promoting the use of videoconferencing, click here.

by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect

Two months ago, I made a post to this blog introducing the next major release of Adobe Connect and Adobe Connect Mobile. Today, I couldn’t be happier to announce that we’ve reached a major milestone – Adobe Connect 9 is now generally available.

Adobe Connect 9 brings with it some incredible new features to help our customers create exceptional events.

We’ve worked with the Adobe CQ team to make it incredibly easy to create gorgeous micro-sites to promote and register participants for your events. We’ve worked with the Adobe SiteCatalyst team to make sure you can measure virtually every aspect of your webinar and optimize future events and marketing campaigns.

You’ll see enhancements in every part of the product. A new Engagement Dashboard to help customers measure engagement in real-time, a new feature to highlight active speakers, new editing capabilities that enable you to anonymize and enhance recordings, as well as the ability to incorporate SCORM content in your training curriculums.

There’s too much to list in this blog post, but you can find out more here: http://www.connectusers.com/community/monthly_topic/archive/2012/06/adobe_connect_9/

Now that we’ve gone live, we’ll be upgrading customers with hosted deployments in a phased manner around the globe, starting today and continuing through the end of 2012.  If you have a hosted deployment and want to check your upgrade date, you may do so here by entering your account url into the widget in the upper-right of the page.

Current customers with on-premise deployments who are eligible for upgrades will receive an email from us in the coming seven to 10 days with details on how to access the upgrade.

If you aren’t already an Adobe Connect customer, we encourage you to learn more on our website and take a test drive by signing up for a free, 30-day trial, which will be updated to Adobe Connect 9 later today.

In addition, stay tuned for our release of Adobe Connect Mobile 2.0, coming very soon.  Adobe Connect Mobile 2.0 gives meeting hosts even more capabilities; enabling them to manage virtually every aspect of their Adobe Connect room from their mobile device.  It allows for device-to-device collaboration, eliminating the need for a PC altogether.

We are exceptionally proud of the quality of this release and we know you’ll feel the same way as you begin using it. Today truly marks a major milestone for Adobe Connect, but there’s no time to slow down now. We’ve already begun innovating on the *next* version.

There are two two separate pods in Adobe Connect that enable participants to ask questions during a meeting, virtual classroom or webinar.

The Chat pod allows for completely open discussion among all participants and private discussion between two participants or a participant and a group (like the presenters). The Chat pod is unmoderated, which means anyone can post a question or comment and it will be seen immediately by everyone. Private chat appears in a separate tab in the chat pod.

The Q&A pod is similar in that anyone can post a question or comment to the pod, but unlike the chat pod, those posts are only seen by the presenters and hosts in a meeting. A presenter or host can choose to answer a question in the Q&A pod either publicly (in which case everyone will see the question and the answer) or privately (in which case only the questioner will see the question and answer). Questions from the Q&A pod can be assigned to a specific presenter.

So which pod should you use? Should you moderate your discussion or not? The answer of course depends on your web conference. As the host of a meeting, I usually ask myself a few questions when making this decision.

•  Is the goal to enable participants to ask me questions – or am I looking to facilitate a conversation between participants?
• How do I feel about participants chatting privately? Will this be a distraction to the meeting or will it increase engagement?
• Are there questions I might not be comfortable answering in public?
• How many participants are attending? What kind of meeting is it?

In general, I prefer to use an open, un-moderated chat pod. I find it can increase interaction among all participants. The un-moderated chat pod is ideal for collaborative meetings and often works well for virtual classrooms.

I believe it’s important not only use meeting size as the only factor – but as a meeting grows, it makes sense to swap out the un-moderated chat pod for a moderated Q&A pod. At this point, it also helps to have someone else in the meeting helping to moderate the Q&A pod while you speak. The Q&A pod is ideal for webinars.

Of course, you can have the best of both worlds. I’ll often use an open chat pod in my webinar lobby that participants can use while they’re waiting for a webinar to begin, then switch to a moderated Q&A pod during the webinar itself.

Tips & Tricks

• Encourage users to change the color of their text when using the chat pod. It helps to differentiate the questions and makes everything more readable.
• The presenter view of the Q&A pod can be sent to the Presenter Only Area (POA). This enables the presenters to work with a much larger pod while they are facilitating the questions.
• You can add multiple chat pods to a single layout. This is helpful when you want to solicit feedback across a number of different topics. Simply double-click the title of a chat pod to rename it.
• You can export a Q&A log of all of the questions that were asked as a rich text file. You can also email the content of any Q&A or chat pod. Click the pod options menu to access these options.
• You can use an un-moderated chat pod and still disable private chat. This can be quickly disabled in the Preferences dialog.

We’re pleased to announce that a new Adobe Connect add-in is now available with official support for Mac OS X Lion (10.7.2). The version of the new Mac add-in is 9.4.90.0. The add-in is not required to participate in an Adobe Connect meeting, but it provides additional functionality for meeting hosts and presenters such as screen-sharing and enhanced audio support during a web conference.

The new add-in will be automatically downloaded for all hosts and presenters using a mac when they use functionality specific to the add-in in the latest Adobe Connect 8.2.1 release. If needed, the new add-in can be downloaded and pushed to Mac users in a locked down environment. The new add-in has been tested with Adobe Connect 8.1 and later releases. It’s important that Lion users have updated to the latest Lion build of 10.7.2. Earlier releases of Lion (10.7 or 10.7.1) will not work with the add-in. You can find downloading instruction and a list of Lion-specific issues here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/912/cpsid_91251.html

- Sanjay Agrawal

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

Continuing on the theme of extensibility and web conferencing — including recent, related posts on California State University Chancellor’s Office and New Horizons Computer Learning Centers — today we’re showcasing yet another organization taking advantage of this capability to produce for clients.

Tat Communication wanted to find a way to deliver higher-quality online meetings as cost effectively as possible. The goal was to offer customers rich, dynamic webinars—while being sensitive to expense.

Adobe Connect combined with Refined Data’s Talking Stick custom meeting pod (for enhanced video and audio functionality) is helping Tat deliver high-end, engaging productions that draw an average of 300 participants per session. Clients are engaging staff and partners, while Tat is carving a niche and creating competitive advantage.

Check out the full story here.

More to come on extensibility – please stay in touch with us here and on Twitter: @AdobeConnect as we continue to share stories, news and views on a wide range of web conferencing topics.

In marketing, we tend to use a lot of text and PowerPoint slides to communicate. While that can be effective, I always find myself wanting to jump out of “slide” mode and into “demo” mode – especially when discussing Adobe Connect and web conferencing.

Adobe Connect – particularly the new version 8 – was created with the customer experience in mind. It makes more sense for me to show you the powerful features instead of trying to describe them. A picture is worth a thousand words – and video uses about 30 pictures every second.

With that in mind, I’ve created this video walkthrough of Adobe Connect 8, including enhancements from Service Pack 1, in which I can show you what makes this product a joy to use every day.

By Guillaume Privat, Director Product Management, Adobe Connect

The Product Management team is really excited to bring you Adobe Connect 8.  The release had been 2 years in the making and was a colossal effort for the entire team.

We are now planning what Adobe Connect NEXT will be all about and would like your input.  Help us write what the next release will be about.

In partnership with Brightidea, we have launched the Adobe Connect Ideas site where you can submit new ideas for the product, review and vote on ideas posted by others.

Traditionally, we have received feed-back from users either directly by email, via our sales engineers, via our partners and resellers, via the forums on Connectusers.com.  But as the community of Adobe Connect users continue to grow, we need a central system where you can easily express your ideas about the product and get input from other users.

Get started today.  Go to http://ideas.adobe.com/connect . You will need an Adobe ID to post or review ideas or comments.

Our second edition of our Adobe Connect Satisfaction Survey is open until November 20.  Please take a moment to let us know your thoughts on our we are doing.  Your input is invaluable to help us prioritize product development investments.

You can access the survey at : http://bit.ly/adobeconnectsat

You can review the results of the previous survey in one of my previous blog post, here.

To thank you for taking the time to fill in the survey you will be enrolled in a draw to win a copy of Photoshop CS5.

Looking forward to read all your survey questionnaires.

Two weeks ago, I spoke at a panel at IT Expo.  The subject of the panel was: Business Continuity via a Travel Reduction Plan.  Trade shows like IT Expo are great to get a feel for what a lot of decision makers are thinking, or key marketing trends.

On the panel web conferencing was a hot topic. Here is a summary of topics covered on the panel and conversations I had at the show.

For right or wrong, web conferencing is no longer about travel cost savings.  Most IT departments assume that because they have rolled out web conferencing, they have provided their organization the tool to reduce travel cost.  But I have not met anyone who could tell me precisely how much their web conferencing deployment is saving them on travel cost, nor how much more they could save if they were able to drive more usage out of their web conferencing solution.   This is inline with what we are seeing with Adobe Connect.  Our customers are no longer justifying their deployment or extension of Adobe Connect in terms of cost saving but rather in terms of productivity improvement or top-line revenue increase. Many training organization see their biggest growth from online classes: the experience they provide online becomes mission critical.

Next key topic was Unified Communications.  At IT expo, many people recognize that UC was a marketing ploy from large vendor to try to bundle together multiple technologies with different maturities.  For many it seemed a technology in search of a problem as opposed to a clear solution to a business need.  Most people had chosen to deploy best of breed architecture and were desperate that all large vendors could not agree on a common standard for UC either from a signalization level, presence indication or video codecs.  Instead of focusing on adding features and technology to UC, vendors should focus on ease of use: a lot of organization employ directly or indirectly full time staff to help people launch their video conference !  Simplification of the UI has always be a major focus for Adobe Connect and all the more so in our upcoming Connect 8 release.

Final hot topic was around Social Media and generational divide in the enterprise.  Most people agreed that Social Media had still not discovered a killer app in the enterprise that would spur a large growth.  It was also recognized that the growth of Social Media, or collaboration in general including web conferencing, is hindered by cultural factor.  In many organization, people use to gain power by retaining information.  Social Media change this paradigm: people gain power by sharing too much information !