Adobe Connect Blog

From the Developer: Mike Kollen, CTO/Architect, eSyncTraining

The Internet and mobile technologies have made it easier than ever for businesses to identify and work with the best people for the job, no matter where they are. But in the legal industry, issues such as information security, ongoing collaboration, and trust often still lead to an emphasis on more face-to-face communication. Whether meeting with clients or opposing counsel, many attorneys will travel across the city or even across the globe to meet in person. Legal professionals are understandably looking for ways to bring the benefits of online collaboration into their work without sacrificing personal, secure interactions.

Face-to-face meetings come with many challenges, ranging from high costs to delays to difficulty coordinating schedules. For example, time spent traveling is simply wasted for any attorney or other legal professional who closely tracks the time spent on cases. Finding a way to effectively eliminate travel would be a big step towards reducing costs and enabling legal teams to focus their time on more productive activities for their firms and clients. Fortunately, a wider range of proven online meeting technologies are available today, offering enhanced security and the tools to collaborate smoothly.

As an example, take Veritext, a leader in court reporting and deposition solutions in the United States, whose customers rely on them to provide services and technologies that streamline the deposition process and help manage even the most complex cases. Seeing the potential benefits of virtual meetings, Veritext set a goal to create a secure web conferencing system that enables legal participants to share documents and ideas in real time, just like they would in in-person meetings, except without the time, costs, and delays of travel, and worked with us at eSyncTraining to accomplish this.

The solution we came up with was StreamText Legal, which we further customized for Veritext’s own Veritext Virtual. Based on the web conferencing software Adobe Connect, the solution offers high-quality live video and not just screen-sharing. It is a more secure file sharing that lets attorneys upload documents or exhibits for all participants to see. The StreamText Legal solution and Veritext Virtual also go a step further, offering a virtual legal deposition and transcription pod for Adobe Connect. With this technology, meetings and depositions gain live, instantly searchable transcriptions for a clear and accurate record.

With these services, suddenly online meetings feel a lot more like in-person interactions. Attorneys can meet “face-to-face” with clients or opposing council and review documents together, all in a highly secure environment. In addition, Veritext Virtual brings some added benefits only possible in online meetings by archiving all audio, video, documents, and transcripts instantly for a complete record of the deposition.

Technology is making the world a whole lot smaller with telecommunications, telecommuting, and teleconferences. It’s no surprise that tele-depositions are already gaining in popularity. Enhanced, more reliable online collaboration is removing physical barriers from business, even in industries like legal where resistance to new approaches is often understandable given concerns about security and other issues. By taking distance out of the equation, clients are free to work with the best legal teams and apply the technology best suited for their situation, no matter where they are located.

For more information on the solution, a case study can be viewed here, and you can learn how to get ahold of the pod here.

By Guillaume Privat, Director Product Management, Adobe Connect

A year ago, we launched the Adobe Connect ideas website to capture your inputs on what we should build in the product.  So far the feed-back has been great and we have already implemented many ideas in our C8, C8.1 and C8.2 releases.  Some ideas however are a better fit for 3rd party developers leveraging our SDK.

We have added categories and statuses to the idea site to help surface these ideas.  So whether you are a developer in search of inspiration to create a custom pod, or would like to submit custom pod ideas, read on for some suggestion on how to do this.

Adding a custom pod idea

Say you are a user of Adobe Connect and have an idea for a potential extension, for instance an Angry Birds collaborative pod: just log to the Adobe Connect Idea site with your Adobe ID, create a new idea by clicking on “post idea”.  Fill in the title and the description and select the category “custom pod”.  Submit.  Look at responses from the community on your idea. Simple and easy.

Viewing suggested ideas

If you are a developer in search of inspiration, the Adobe Connect ideas website can provide that inspiration.  Go the ideas site, and on the right side panel filter by either category = “custom pod” or status = “For SDK developer”.  Review the idea and post comments (you will need to log in using your Adobe ID to do so) to request more feedback on the idea.

To vote on my Angry Bird idea, vote here !

I frequently get asked how to better engage participants during Adobe Connect presentations. My answer is always –EMOTICONS  – icons participants can click on to express emotions that appear next to their names in the attendee list. These emoticons can express laughter or applause, ask the host to speak louder or slow down, or show raised hands. They’re a great way for presenters to engage an audience during a live meeting.

The emoticon “Raise Hand” feature is a way for participants to ask for microphone rights during a VoIP meeting. If a host acknowledges an attendee’s raised hand by “accepting” it, that allows the participant voice rights.

A great product legacy story is when I first began hosting web meetings in Adobe Connect—and before the emoticons were part of the product—participants used to “clap” by typing “………” in the chat pod. Today, we’ve made expressing emotions during a meeting much more fun, I think.

If you haven’t, give emoticons a try in your next meeting. And let us know what emoticons you’d like to see in Adobe Connect next.

-Amy Brooks, Adobe Connect Event Producer

The new Adobe Connect 8 compatible MP3 Player extension is now available for download from the Adobe Connect Exchange. The MP3 player is a small Adobe Flash file (SWF) that streams royalty-free music into your Adobe Connect web conferencing room.

Created by our own Alistair Lee (@alistairlee), the MP3 Player allows participants to change the music track and raise or lower volume.  A new set of host controls can allow synchronous play while participants can still control their own volume. The MP3 is one of our more popular extensions and is most commonly placed in a lobby layout of an Adobe Connect meeting room. Playing the MP3 is an excellent way for participants to adjust their speaker levels and confirm they are correctly receiving an audio stream prior to the start time of a meeting.

The Adobe Connect MP3 Player can be downloaded in the Adobe Connect Exchange here.

And you can download instructions and information on how to change the song playlist here.

–Amy Brooks (@ConnectSupport)

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.

In late March, we posted the new real-time caption pod extension for Adobe Connect 8 to the Adobe Exchange (you can find it here). Andrew Kirkpatrick, who looks after accessibility across Adobe, has a nice post on the subject on his team’s blog.

As part of my responsibility on our product management team, I worked with the external developer of the pod (they did a great job; more on them later) and wanted to share a few thoughts on the intent of the extension and, at a high level, how it can be used.

With the new Adobe Connect closed caption pod, real-time captioning of audio content can be easily integrated into meetings and events delivered via Adobe Connect. This extension ensures that participants who are deaf or hard of hearing can fully participate in online meetings and events.

The closed caption pod appears as a new pod to your Adobe Connect meeting environment. Meeting organizers hire professional captioning services from providers such as the Media Access Group at WGBH, Caption Colorado, and Caption First. Professional stenographers attend the Adobe Connect meeting or teleconference to listen to the audio and transcribe the information using specialized stenographer’s keyboards. This information is then transmitted to a captioning server.

The captions are transmitted to the Adobe Connect meeting and viewed by end users. Meeting participants have the ability to customize the caption font size and color settings to enhance readability. Participants can even skip back to re-read previous captions and then fast forward to the current captions. Participants can individually choose to display or not display captions on their individual screen. And participants can optionally save the captions as a transcript and download them at the conclusion of a meeting.

The extension is a great example of what can be done by any Flex developer using the Adobe Connect Collaboration Builder SDK available for free from the Adobe Developer Connection. Again, the developer of this pod, eSyncTraining, did a great job leveraging their Flex development expertise – adding robust new functionality to any Adobe Connect meeting to perfectly address a specific need.

If you haven’t, I encourage you to read more about and download the pod on the Adobe Exchange. And let us know your thoughts in comments or on Twitter @AdobeConnect.

Cheers,
Peter Ryce, Adobe Connect Evangelist

We just released a new XMPP Multi-user Chat pod for Adobe Connect 8 meetings. This meeting extension lets Adobe Connect meeting users participate in multi-user XMPP-based chat sessions – chatting directly with users who may be participating in the chat using other tools such as Jabber or Adium. This greatly extends the collaborative possibilities of Adobe Connect into existing presence and instant messaging systems, allowing text chats to integrate with, and escalate easily into, the richer and more productive Adobe Connect meeting environment.

Adobe Connect meeting hosts access chat rooms (“text conferences”) hosted on an XMPP server by launching this new extension in the Share pod during the meeting and connecting to their target XMPP server (server address, port). Hosts can then browse available text conference rooms and choose which conference room to join.

Once a chat room is joined the Adobe Connect meeting participants can simply view the chat as guests without logging in (guest viewing can be disabled by the host), or participants can each log into the XMPP server with their own credentials to participate from within the Adobe Connect meeting room. Chat can continue seamlessly with other meeting activities such as video, audio, screen sharing, and white-boarding.

The XMPP Chat extension supports secure connections to the XMPP server and is compliant with the XMPP standard.

You can download the new extension here. And, as always, we’re interested in your thoughts in comments or via Twitter (@AdobeConnect).