Adobe Connect Blog

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

By Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect

On November 8 2011, Adobe held its annual financial meeting where our executives discussed our 2012 strategy. Two items discussed were i) the focusing of Adobe resources on two key growth opportunities, Digital Media and Digital Marketing and ii) how Adobe will be reducing its investment in Flash Player for mobile.

You may be wondering what both of these announcements mean for the Adobe Connect business.

First, while Adobe is realigning its resources around two key growth opportunities, the Adobe Connect business will continue to further product innovation for customers in key verticals.

Second, Adobe also announced it was reducing its investment in Adobe Flash for mobile (in-browser Flash experience on mobile). This does not have an impact on Adobe’s Connect mobile strategy. Our strategy with Adobe Connect Mobile has been from the start to deliver our mobile meeting experience via native applications rather than via a browser as we believe apps provide the best mobile experience. Last week, we launched our latest version of Adobe Connect Mobile 1.7.5 and are already hard at work on our next release.

Adobe remains committed to delivering the best web conferencing solution to our customers.

By Guillaume Privat, Director Product Management, Adobe Connect

That’s it.  Adobe Connect 8 has been rolled out to all our customers.

We were waiting for that complete roll out before launching the third edition of our Adobe Connect Satisfaction Survey which is open until August 29.  Please take a moment to let us know your thoughts on how we are doing and whether Adobe Connect 8 has improved your experience with the product.  Your input is invaluable to help us prioritize product development investments.

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

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 CS 5.5.

But before you invest the time to fill in this survey, you might wonder what we do with the results.  So let me summarize the results of our last survey and the action plans we implemented as a consequence.

Satisfaction:

The overall satisfaction remained at the same level as the previous survey with some areas with sharp increase (over 10%):  particularly technical support, communications for our hosted customers and in the product white-boarding.  Each item had received less than stellar reviews in the previous satisfaction survey and had been an area of focus for our teams.  It was good to see our efforts yielded positive impacts on your satisfaction.

Areas of improvement:

We received high marks on most product areas, but particularly for the continued ease of use of the product.  However, through your answers, you pointed to couple of areas of the product which could be improved:  the events module and training reporting.  This is all the more important as you also indicated, that internal and external training or webinars were your primary use cases for Adobe Connect.  As a result, these two areas are now being the focus for our future development effort.  Expect improvements to our events module in future releases.

Thank you for all of you who took the time to fill in the second survey.  The copy of Photoshop CS5 went to the winner of the draw at Onondaga Case Management Service.

Looking forward to read all your answers and comments to this third survey.

By Arun Anantharaman, VP and GM, Adobe Connect

2010 was a fantastic year for Adobe Connect and our customers. Wanted to share with you some highlights:

• We announced and initiated the rollout of Adobe Connect 8—a major upgrade that has been well received, generating enthusiastic quotes. Among them:

“I’m completely convinced that Adobe Connect 8, the latest version of their online meeting and collaboration software, can actually beat the average business meeting in terms of usefulness, engagement, and simplicity.” ZDNet

“To sum it up quickly, Adobe Connect 8 is easier to use, offers better collaboration, richer audio and video experiences, improved access and extensibility, and increased security and support.” Learning Solutions (5 stars)

”Boasting a completely redesigned user interface, Adobe Connect 8 should prove to be easier to use for both presenters and conference attendees.” GigaOm

“Adobe introduces a variety of new features and capabilities in Adobe Connect 8 designed to make the entire online meeting process smoother and more intuitive.” PC World

• We also introduced Adobe Connect Mobile applications for the Android and Apple iOS platforms to help users extend reach and enhance their productivity.
• Our hosted minutes delivered increased from approximately 20 million minutes/month (in 2008) to over 140 million minutes/month (excludes on-premise deployments).
• We helped enable the collaboration and online training needs of major organizations in the public sector, including the Defense Information Systems Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. State Department (including streaming addresses by President Obama and other senior staff, such as Secretary of State Clinton), as well as major corporations and organizations, including SAP, Xerox, FranklinCovey, Memorial Hermann Hospital, MDC Partners, and others.
• Adobe was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of the Gartner, Inc. 2010 “Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing” research report.
• Adobe was recognized as a “Leader” in The Forrester Wave: Web Conferencing (.pdf), Q2 2010 report, which stated, “Adobe offers the best user experience.”
• Adobe Connect won both the Best Web Seminar and Best Virtual Classroom categories in the Best of Elearning! 2010 reader’s choice awards program.

We’re excited about these milestones and many others that point to the momentum for Adobe Connect. With the ongoing input of our customers (you!) who require the best and most of our technology, we look forward to continuing to provide you with the richest, most extensible, most flexible web conferencing solution on the market.

Here’s to a successful 2010—and an exciting 2011 ahead!

Cheers,

Arun

Hello! Michael Londgren here. I look after product marketing for Adobe Connect at the company. Checking in today about the 2010 Gartner, Inc. “Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing”.

As we announced in late November, Adobe was positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of the research report. We were one of 15 vendors evaluated in the report.

Of those vendors positioned in the Leaders Quadrant, David Mario Smith of Gartner wrote in the report:

“Vendors in the Leaders Quadrant have achieved significant market share while demonstrating an ability to respond to customers’ needs. Leaders have robust, scalable products with a wide range of features, a large installed base, acceptable financial performance and good distribution. Leaders are doing well today and are prepared for the future.”

We encourage you to check out the complete report for yourself here (.pdf).

And you can learn more about Adobe Connect here.

Cheers,

Michael

 By Vincent Toesca, Group Product Manager, Adobe Connect

 Almost a year ago, I was discussing in another blog post the ascent of video as a way to enrich interpersonal communications.

This vision is increasingly becoming reality– at home and in the office. There’s not a day passing by without a new announcement around new video or “HD” capabilities by software vendors. What does it mean exactly for those in charge of selecting conferencing solutions? And how fast and how far will these new advancements reach everyday corporate users?

Removing complexity to drive usage

Videoconferencing has been characterized by complex endpoints and obscure acronyms (ISDN, VNOC, MPLS, QoS etc.) that have deterred quite a lot of casual users. No wonder that the utilization rate of these systems is typically less than 5% on a daily basis (source: Gartner, 2010). They also remain chiefly closed-loop systems, with more than 90% of all videoconferencing taking place among endpoints in the same enterprise But while these paltry numbers would give organizations little incentive to add more cost, risk and complexity to grow their video network, recent trends have marked a shift in the fortunes of videoconferencing.

Increasing reach even more than quality

The focus is moving from pure video quality to user experience, with an emphasis on reach and simplicity. The broader availability of camera-equipped devices and the popularization of online video through consumer services are reshaping the landscape. Here are a few usage and technological factors that are involved in this change:

• Software-based vs room-based: the dichotomy between VTC solutions (an expensive combination of endpoints, room systems, MCUs and services) and software-only video services is dissipating, with a gradual convergence of quality, and a faster expansion of the latter.  Meeting attendees who cannot reach a room and who are external to the organizations can participate from desktop- or web-based clients, with quality up to and including HD.
• Quality and bandwidth optimization: new IP video codecs (such as H.264) have dramatically improved video quality, without increasing bandwidth consumption. That is a prerequisite for IT departments, still wary of potential bandwidth overuse on their network. They also enable an experience that is rich and lifelike enough to endear end-users, who expect the fidelity of what they receive and broadcast to be high-quality and compelling. 
• Streaming and delivery: videoconferencing has moved almost completely to IP; all new video endpoints are IP-capable. But the coexistence of different protocols for establishing sessions (H.323, SIP), and the disparities in how well they allow video streams to traverse network firewalls, proxies and NAT, have constrained most organizations to use videoconferencing only internally. This is changing with the standardization on more firewall-friendly technologies, such a SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), and the delivery of new video services over managed networks and using SIP trunks.

Fulfilling promises for end-users and administrators alike

With our new Adobe Connect 8 release (now generally available), we have put a specific emphasis on high-quality, hassle-free visual communications. Being the first webconferencing solution offering robust video capabilities, our product had set the pace for bringing new digital experiences and interactions to enterprise customers.

• Deliver from multiple sources: a key new feature of Adobe Connect 8 is the ability to acquire a video stream from a SIP-based room system and broadcast it to all meeting participants present in an Adobe Connect room. Individual participants can also broadcast their own video feed, captured from a webcam. This truly achieves the converge of video streams into one single software-based solution, delivered at an infinitesimal cost over existing network infrastructures. 
• Deliver across screens: Adobe Connect delivers rich video features based on benchmarks set by the conferencing industry. The next challenge will be to optimize the video quality and resolution based on the properties of the receiving devices and increase video portability.  Beyond conventional desktops, the fast-growing penetration of smartphones and tablets with new form factors (e.g. front-facing cameras) and smaller footprint will drive this requirement. Adobe Connect has already embraced the need for accessing conferencing across screens, with mobile versions running on Google Android and Apple iOS; and other platforms are planned for the future.
• Deliver across network boundaries: here comes the foundational advantage of Adobe Connect, with the pervasive and firewall-friendly Adobe Flash platform. Battle-tested in the Internet space, where it supports about 80% of online videos, Adobe Flash provides a delivery mechanism that overcomes a lot of network barriers and improves the prospects for external calling. 

I once heard a senior executive joking about a telepresence meeting he had to attend: he spent over one hour driving to the venue where the telepresence meeting was hosted.  It was probably better than physically flying to the other coast for the meeting, but it certainly fell short of eliminating travel costs and travel time. With Adobe Connect 8 and its future iterations, we’re striving to enable a cost-efficient and user-friendly experience for video, universally delivered thanks to Adobe Flash.

By Vincent Toesca, Group Product Manager, Adobe Connect

Easy is hard. This seemingly contradictory statement could capture well our efforts to simplify our award-winning online meeting and training solution with the release of Adobe Connect 8.

While our previous versions had been praised for providing a sleeker and more user-friendly experience than comparable products, we spent a great deal of time meeting with our customers and listening to one simple but enlightening message they delivered to us: “the feature set of Adobe Connect is much richer than any other; we don’t need more, but better.”

Not more but better. Over the past months, we have worked intensively with Adobe’s user experience researchers, interface designers, engineers and, of course, existing Adobe Connect users to understand how we could improve user interactions and make our meeting interface even more intuitive, especially for casual users. The advent of consumer tools such as public instant messaging networks and IP-based phone-call services, and the smarter form factor of novel electronic devices have accustomed us to simplified digital experiences. We strived to remodel Adobe Connect along those lines, while maintaining our rich set of options for power users.   

Our new meeting user interface not only offers a more compelling design and fresher look but also achieves a better organization and more prominent display of important and frequently used controls and capabilities. Here are a few examples:

• Enhanced audio and video controls. These settings have been regrouped to be accessed from one central place. Now organized at the top of the meeting bar, they are more visible and easily accessible.
• Unified attendee management. All participant management functions can be executed from the Attendee pod, including breakout-out rooms. Participant role and rights can now be updated using drag and drop; a rollover menu enables participants to quickly initiate actions, such as private chats, with each other.
• Optimized screen use. The meeting interface rescales intelligently to provide optimum viewing based on each participant’s screen resolution. Presenters can also size their own version of the presenter-only area individually without impacting the view of other presenters.
• Improved accessibility. Navigation via keyboard and hot keys has been improved and major improvements have been achieved in screen reader compatibility with JAWS and Win-Eyes.
• Advanced chat. Text-based conversations within the meeting room have been reorganized into separate tabs for public and private conversations.
• Rich Notes pod. Rich formatting capabilities have been added in the Notes pod to facilitate the capture of notes and comments during collaborative meeting, save them as rich documents and send them by email after the meeting.
• Simplified Q&A pod. The submission and management of questions during webinar-like sessions has been consolidated into one single frame, with differentiated views for presenters and participants.
• Enhanced Whiteboard. New workflows, such as quickly adding text to custom shapes, have been added. The whiteboard can also be used in the overlay mode on top of a shared document to zoom and pan along with the document.

In this simplification process, we have made sure to preserve all the key workflows that Adobe Connect users have come to rely upon for their meeting and training needs. But overall, they are now easier to discover and use.

Not more but better, I wrote earlier. But a little more too, in this new release. New back-end capabilities, such as integration with videoconferencing systems, duplex universal voice and enhanced room access protection, are hallmark features of Adobe Connect 8. They enable our customers to leverage their existing investments in adjacent communications systems, such as audioconferencing and videoconferencing platforms, and provide their employees and partners with a more unified and coherent digital experience for collaboration.

In future posts, my team and I will be glad to continue to walk you through the new benefits of Adobe Connect 8. We look forward to having you use our new version.  Our official trial will be available very soon, but if you’d like to get a sneak peek now – you are invited to sign up for a free 30-day account offered as part of our customer preview program. If you are a current customer, we have created the Adobe Connect 8 Migration Center  to help you prepare for the new version.  If you are a Hosted Services customer, we have a widget on that page that you can use to look up your anticipated upgrade date.

We hope you will enjoy Adobe Connect 8 with the same excitement and enthusiasm as we put into building it.

Adobe released last week an update to our industry-leading webconferencing solution, with Adobe Connect 7.5 Service Pack 1. This service pack is available at no additional cost to all licensed customers with active maintenance and support plan, and to all hosted customers. Hosted accounts are gradually updated over time, and hosted customers will be notified ahead of time when their account is scheduled for upgrade.

Before discussing the details of this service pack, we’re glad to announce that we have further simplified our product name, with “Adobe Connect”. Why, you ask? First because most of you were already referring to our solution as such (or sometimes even as “Connect”). But also because a shorter and more explicit brand makes it easier for end-users, systems administrators, industry experts and media professionals altogether to distinguish our solution and feel familiar with it.

As for this service pack itself, three themes have been center-stage: telephony, platform support and quality.

1. Telephony integration has for long been core to Connect, and Connect 7.5 sustained this trend last year with the extension of our partner ecosystem to InterCall and the release of the universal voice feature. Interworking with audio conferencing providers is also part of our open approach towards unifying communications, without forcing enterprises to align on one single vendor. In Service Pack 1, we have made remodeled our telephony architecture to enable:

Feature parity across all adaptors. Each telephony adaptor (e.g. PGI, InterCall, MeetingOne) now equally supports functionality such as breakout audioconferencing (when breakout rooms are activated), token merge to automatically link unknown callers in the attendee list pod, and the ability to mute all.

Ease of use. The application handles all standardized formats for phone numbers, facilitating end-users’ input especially when calling internationally. Administrators can now trigger bulk uploads of telephony profiles for their entire organization.

Ease of installation. Changes in telephony configuration no longer requires the restart of the main Connect service. Additionally, setup documentation has been streamlined.

2. Platform support means that we keep evolving our solution components to run on the latest versions of operating systems. In Service Pack 1, we have officially added back-end support for Windows Server 2008 (OS) and SQL Server 2008 (database). Peripherally, we have improved support for single-sign-on integration (SSO), by allowing the passing of credentials through custom headers and cookies.

3. Quality is part our unwavering commitment to providing not just a collaboration solution, but also an experience that is rich, reliable and enjoyable. In Service Pack 1, we have kept working hard on improving the quality of audio and addressing concerns reported by our customers. For instance, we have extended the ability to turn on echo cancellation (audio set up wizard) to Mac users and delivered several other minor changes that cumulatively make a sharp difference.

Finally, all these additions are delivered with little impact on users’ systems: no upgrade of the Adobe Flash Player is required, and attendees can keep using the baseline Flash Player 8 (or later versions, such as Adobe Flash Player 9 or 10) to participate in meetings. Only presenters and hosts are offered an update to the meeting Add-in.

For further details about Service Pack 1, I invite you to view this excellent presentation by Alistair Lee.

By Vincent Toesca

Going green by using technology to reduce overall environmental impact has become a core tennant of social responsibility and sustainability initiatives in IT, training, marketing, and sales departments worldwide. As part of this month’s Topic of the Month on ConnectUsers.com, we’ll explore how you can implement strategies to enable a more green workforce and put metrics in place to ensure that you achieve green initiatives while bringing unexpectedly large cost savings to your bottom line.

Continue reading…

We’ve been hard at work at a major overhaul of the Acrobat Connect Pro Community Site, ConnectUsers.com. There are many new site features that will allow Connect Pro users to connect like you never have before. Among the new key features are
* A new look and feel
* A completed redesigned homepage
* A new community area of the site where you can create public profiles, find other users, view the community galleries and more.
* A new always changing Topic of the Month so you can keep growing your Connect Pro knowledge.
* New site-wide topics that allow you to find content organized by category.
Visit this News article on ConnectUsers.com to see all the new features:
http://www.connectusers.com/news/index.php?cmd=display_news&id=2680
Start connecting by exploring the new site and create your public profile today!