Adobe Connect Blog

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 !

Over the last 12 months, the Connect Pro product management team has been very busy bringing new enhancements to the product that culminated with the launch of Connect Pro 7.5 and recently our Connect Pro iPhone app.
As we are in the middle of the planning of our next release cycle, we want to make sure we invest in the area that make the most sense to you. We realize that between Connect Pro 7 and 7.5, the product has grown its feature set very quickly, but as we move forward, before implementing new features, we want to make sure you are happy with the way the current set of feature work.
The way our team typically get this information is via informal meeting with our customers, feed-back from our support or sales team, annual marketing research projects, bug reports or product enhancements reports. The drawback of these methods is that they do not reach across all our user base and do not provide consistent and regular feed-back.
We are looking at a way to hear from you more often and more systematically. That’s why we are starting to roll out a satisfaction survey that we will conduct every quarter where we will ask you about your experience with Connect Pro. Not just with the product and its feature, but also documentation, support, installation, etc…
This will become our score card on how well we are doing. This will become a blueprint for the investment we need to make to ensure the highest level of satisfaction with Connect Pro. After every survey, we will publish the conclusion and communicate openly (or as openly as any public company can do before breaking a serie of SEC regulations) the action plans we are putting in place to address any issue surfaced in the survey.
To help us improve the Connect Pro service, please visit http://bit.ly/cprosat. It should not take more than 20 minutes of your time. Leave us your name and email address and we will enroll you into a draw to win a copy of Adobe PhotoShop CS4 Extended (retail value of $999).
Looking forward to hear from you all.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference is a forum for business and IT leaders to focus on building more agile and productive business cultures through the use of tools and technologies. Adobe is pleased to be a Gold Sponsor of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference , which is being held November 2-5, 2009. “Unlocking the business value of Enterprise 2.0″ is the theme of this year’s inaugural San Francisco version of the conference. In his keynote address on November 3rd, Rob Tarkoff, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Business Productivity Solutions group at Adobe Systems, will talk about the Customer-Driven Enterprise and what the future of customer interactions will look like. Adobe will also be making some exciting announcements at the show. I’ll be there and hope you will too!
In addition to the keynote, Adobe has a booth in the joint VoiceCon/Enterprise 2.0 Expo Pavillion on Tuesday, November 3rd and Wednesday, November 4th from noon til 5pm. We’ll have Connect Pro and Adobe Livecycle ES product experts and demo stations. Be sure to stop by booth #722 to discuss with us our solutions and to see them in action. Note — since a good portion of the Connect Pro product team is based in San Francisco, there will be quite a few of us at the booth and attending sessions — so be sure to come talk to us about how we can help you engage with your customers, partners and employees.

Looking for answers to your Acrobat Connect Pro questions, but not sure where to go? There are a number of great online resources available to make you successful when using Connect Pro, such as our user community ConnectUsers.com, Online Help, our Resource Center and more. To make it easier for you to find the right information, we recently made a number of changes on the Acrobat Connect Pro Support Page, we made improvements to the user interface and added quite a bit of content. We now have a “Top Picks” section which we will refresh with new content based on what we hear from our customers and partners.
While we try to make as much content available to you online, there may be times when you don’t get the answers you need online or just prefer to get answers directly from us you can do that to. We encourage you to do that. The main Connect Pro support page has North America phone numbers listed and there are links to international numbers too.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also address the fact that recently some of our customers calling in to get support have experienced a level of service that is inconsistent with what they expect and deserve. This is unacceptable and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused. Teams are working around the clock to resolve these issues. I encourage you to read the open letter to all Adobe customers from Lambert Walsh, our Vice President of Technical Services, which addresses the situation. Thank you for your patience and understanding – and please continue to share your concerns and feedback with us.

Where were you three weeks ago, on August 3, 2009? If you are a resident of the Commonwealth of Virginia, there is a chance you were at home – working.
In June 2009, Governor Tim Kaine issued an executive order to “green” Virginia, with an aim to increase efficiency in state government operations and save the energy of commuting. One of the initiatives was to encourage individuals and organizations to work from home or a remote location on a statewide Telework Day (Monday, August 3, 2009). While symbolic, this event may have proved a powerful catalyst to drive more pervasive telework adoption across Virginia.

According the Telework Trendlines™ 2009 report issued by WorldatWork, the number of U.S. employees who worked remotely at least one day per month increased 39 percent over the past two years, from approximately 12.4 million in 2006 to 17.2 million in 2008. The sum of all teleworkers – employees, contractors and business owners – has risen 17 percent from 28.7 million in 2006 to 33.7 million in 2008.
 

Making Everyone Win

In Virginia and beyond, telework is a win-win-win opportunity for public and private organizations, their employees, and the environment.

By reducing commuting or discretionary travels, telework supports the reduction of car traffic, greenhouse gas emissions, and mitigates road and air congestion. But it is also a powerful way of increasing operational efficiency. Organizations can save on costly real-estate and office space. They benefit from a highly distributed and cost-effective backup infrastructure (also referred to as “COOP” or “Continuity of Operations”) that can help them keep “business as usual” in case of disruptions, such as a weather event or a flu outbreak.

Telework also supports the recruitment and retention of personnel who may not have joined the organization otherwise. For example, the US Patent and Trademark Office, a Connect Pro customer, has found that they could hire skilled examining attorneys who might not be able or willing to relocate to the Washington, DC area; from geographically constrained, their pool of talent has become truly nationwide.

Finally telework strategies play a critical role in maintaining an upbeat work environment and sustaining employee morale by enabling a positive work/life balance and sparing individual the stress and costs of commuting. No wonder that Governor Kaine described telework as a “family-friendly, business-friendly public policy”.

Providing Easy-To-Use Tools

To demonstrate that work is “something you do, not just a place you go”, it is vital to enable employees to be highly productive from their home, from their car or from a customer’s place of business. They must be granted continuous, on-demand and secure access to the informational resources of the organization. Enterprise collaboration tools, such as Connect Pro for web conferencing, become instrumental in this distributed environment.

Web conferencing is critical to maintain cohesion among distant employees, facilitate the accomplishment of cross-organizational projects and ensure the continuity of business relationships with customers and partners.

While many options exist to meet this need, they are not equally efficient. Many web conferencing solutions from large software vendors look appealing and “well-integrated” on paper; others from lesser-known vendors seem robust enough and surely cost-effective. However when you add up the time needed to deploy their multiple components, the burden of training users and their failures (measured in terms of technical problems or lagging adoption), their cost of opportunity outweighs their benefits.

At Adobe, we believe that ease of use is the #1 factor for end-users and buyers in IT and LOBs. Removing technicalities and downloads is critical to stronger adoption, usage and productivity gains.

Finally, with telework, organizations’ sensitive information is exchanged among more endpoints, more widely distributed in space. Beyond the security of the connections, it is vital to select tools that ensure the integrity of data and comply with internal policies

Choosing a Ubiquitous Platform for Universal, Secure Access

Because it is built on the Adobe Flash platform, Connect Pro offers both instant access and rich experience to all users, across platforms and operating systems. Additionally, it supplies unique compliance and control features so that administrators can regulate the webconferencing usage and ensure adherence to industry and governance regulations.

Companies can also choose among a SaaS-based service hosted by Adobe or an on-premise setup that keeps the system and its data under their full supervision.

A few months ago, I published a tutorial on how to “Work Remotely with Connect Pro” on our Connect Pro User Community website. For those of you willing to institute flexible work arrangements, I hope this guide will give insightful tips and show why Connect Pro is the right technology to enable your telework environment.

As illustrated by our friends in Virginia, it has now become easier to be a good citizen and a productive employee.

By Vincent Toesca

Adobe just released a preview of Acrobat.com Presentations, a new online service that lets people easily create and collaborate on presentations. Just like Adobe Buzzword has changed the way the industry thinks of word processing online, Presentations will likewise transform how presentations are authored and shared.
The Acrobat.com Presentations service is available for free sign-up as public beta on Adobe Labs at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/presentations.

It’s official, Adobe Captivate, the award winning demonstration and simulation authoring environment is coming to the Mac. This has been a long standing request of Captivate (and RoboDemo) users and now its becoming a reality.
The Captivate team is looking for beta testers interested in demoing the Mac version. To learn more and to apply for the beta, visit the Captivate team blog:
http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/05/the_beta_for_captivate_on_mac.html

Once a quarter, we have an employee all hands meeting that usually takes place down the street from Adobe HQ in a large civic auditorium. During these employee meetings, our team uses Connect Pro to broadcast the event to remote participants, and also archive the session.

Continue reading…

In these tough economic times companies are looking for ways to do more with less and ensure that they’re getting the most out of their workforce. Given that the Sales department is the key revenue center for most companies, it is critical that the sales team is able to to be as streamlined as possible across all facets of their jobs. This includes getting trained on projects, interfacing with prospects, upselling current customers, and a whole lot more. Since this seems to be such an area of focus for organizations of all sizes and in all sectors, we decided to focus this month on ways to integrate Connect Pro in the selling process.

Continue reading…

As many of you know Connect Pro is a Flash based application, and runs in any browser that supports Flash Player 8 or higher. I thought it would be fun to show you a short video showing Connect Pro running on the Playstation 3, which actually runs a version of Flash Player 9, it works really well, almost everything that is supported via a desktop based browser also works as expected on the Playstation. However the folks at Sony don’t appear to have enabled support for audio / video device capture so you can’t use the Connect Pro VoIP or Camera capabilities, but you can see other people via video and hear them via VoIP.

The quality of the video I captured isn’t the best, if anyone has some advice regarding better ways to capture screen recordings from the Playstation then please let me know.
I asked my son Tom to demonstrate the whiteboard and camera features by Connecting from another computer, as you can see Connect Pro is so straight forward to use even my five year old knows how to use it!