Adobe Connect Blog

On this day of historic inaugurations, you may have missed that Adobe announced the inaugural version of the Adobe eLearning Suite today (as well as the Technical Communication Suite 2). The eLearning Suite combines the best of Adobe’s eLearning authoring tools including a completely new version of Captivate, version 4), Presenter 7, Soundbooth CS4, and extended products such as a version of Flash Professional CS4 with Flash Quiz Interactions and Dreamweaver CS4 with Course Builder Extensions.
We’ve put together an FAQ on ConnectUsers.com to help Connect Pro customers learn more about the eLearning Suite.

One of the new features on our community site ConnectUsers.com you may have noticed is the Community Gallery. This is a space where community members can share recorded meetings, Presenter presentations, Captivate demonstrations, and anything else Connect Pro related.
The gallery will become a great way for community members to learn from one another by seeing how others are using the product and hopefully it will spark new ideas for how the product can be used. But in order for the gallery to be successful, we need great content.
That’s where you come in. If have a presentation or meeting recording that other community members can benefit from or that you are particularly proud of, we’d love to feature it in the Community Gallery. If you are interested, drop us a line using our Gallery Submission Form and let us know that you are interested in contributing.
Looking forward to seeing your amazing examples,
David

Two of our partners are conducting a series of webinars on how to better use Connect Pro. Ian Justin, VP of Technical Sales and co-founder of GetConnect, and Jacquie Beck, SVP of eLearning at Brookwood, will be conducting a 3 part Connect Pro Webinar Series December 2, 9, and 16, 2008. Register today and learn from some Connect Pro pros:

December 2nd: Video, Voice and Streaming Best Practices:
http://www.brookwood.com/Newsletter/connectwebinar_dec2
December 9th: Branding, Customization and Self-Registration with Events:
http://www.brookwood.com/Newsletter/connectwebinar_dec9
December 16: Tracking Content with the New Reporting Engine, Large Events and Seminar Rooms:
http://www.brookwood.com/Newsletter/connectwebinar_dec16

If you are a user of the social networking site LinkedIn and haven’t joined the Connect Pro Users Group, come and join us. The more people who are in the group, the more valuable a resource it will become to the Connect Pro community. As the community grows, you will be able to find colleagues who may be in similar industries or geographically near and it will help us at Adobe understand where our users are clustered, what kinds of roles you have in your organizations, etc.
Join the Connect Pro Group on LinkedIn today:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=718517

A few months ago, RJ Jácquez, Senior Product Evangelist for the Adobe Technical Communication Suite and Adobe eLearning Solutions started a blog which has quickly become a favorite of professionals in those fields. If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to check it out and get to know RJ. He has a wealth of knowledge and is always ready and willing to help.

http://blogs.adobe.com/rjacquez

Alistair from our team recently posted a new Connect Pro meeting room asset: a flash-based MP3 player that will automatically stream music to all participants.
While a host can upload an MP3 file to a Connect Pro meeting room without the need for a player, that music is synchronized. This means that individual participants have no control over that music.
This flash-based music player streams MP3 files to each individual participant. This gives everybody the ability to pause the song, mute the sound or even change the track. The tracks that he’s added are all royalty free – which means you won’t be hearing any of your favorite music. An XML file accompanies the SWF where you can add or change as many music tracks as you’d like. Simply open the XML file in a text editor and add some pointers to MP3 files that you’ve uploaded to a Connect server.
The MP3 Player is available on the Connect Pro Exchange.

The first Adobe eLearning Challenge has just been announced!
The contest started today and we are looking forward to receiving many great entries in a variety of different categories! Prizes include a full copy of CS3 Web Premium, free registration to the Adobe Learning Summit, a spot at the summit to talk about your entry, and $1000 towards the travel cost to the Summit in San Jose.
Visit http://www.brickfish.com/Lifestyles/eLearningChallenge to learn more about the contest, review contest categories, and how to submit your entry.
You can enter avi-based screen recordings of your engaging projects, a video of yourself talking about how Adobe tools help you solve your eLearning challenges, a screenshot with description, or a story about your projects and your use of Adobe tools.
Good luck! We look forward to seeing your Presenter content, recorded meetings, and stories about how you are taking Connect Pro beyond where we even imagined.

Over the past several months the global oil costs have increased day by day. Finally we are starting to see the price soften as the our behavior changes to adjust the radical travel cost shifts we have seen over the past few months. Personally it certainly impacted my choice for my daily commuting choice when relocating to the bay area recently and also our choice of vehicle rather than our previous family friendly yet carbon overloaded SUV although I wasn’t quite ready to go hybrid just yet, I suspect next time around we might.
I remember back in October last year hearing Gartner’s top strategic IT issues for 2008 I was not completely convinced that the Green IT theme was prime time, now I’m thinking how wrong I was.
Air travel costs are spiraling upwards, my partner recently bought a ticket for $300 to go to England, the tax was $800, $600 of the tax were actually hidden fuel surcharges. Many think the airline industry will never be the same again
Recently The Economist released an interesting report into managing your companys carbon footprint. In this report web conferencing was seen as the most popular way of carbon footprint reduction partly because the impact is so easy to measure (mental note to self, we should produce a syncswf to illustrate this) Further more we collectively have the opportunity for major improvements as 59% of organisations said almost no one works from home on a regular basis. Despite the enthusiasm for web conferencing companies appeared reluctant to mandate use of these technologies with 9% of organisations surveyed prepared to take that line with external meetings, this increased to 22% when related to internal meetings, however this figure rose to 46% when voluntary targets were proposed.
I plan to learn and share more of this area of using web conferencing to help reduce your personal and professional carbon footprint in the mean time I encourage everyone to play there part and help save the world one meeting at a time.

In my first post, I wanted to quickly introduce myself to the Acrobat Connect Pro community.
My name is Mark Blair, some folks may know of me through my work for Adobe, Macromedia and Allaire in Asia Pacific over the last 8 years. I held various roles over the years including Technical Director, running Consulting in the Pacific and leading our server initiatives in the Asia Pacific region. All of these roles were obviously field based with a heavy technical sales focus. I’m looking forward to putting that field knowledge and experience to good use in my role in the Connect Pro product team. As part of me taking the role I relocated to San Francisco from Australia with my family.
My focus in the Connect team is on developing the appropriate partnerships to bring new capabilities to Connect and expose Connect to new markets. I’d be interested to hear feedback in this area as I begin to get up to speed with my new role at Adobe.

We’ve been using Connect Pro 7 internally at Adobe for a while, and I’ve been able to take advantage of some of the great new features…..

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