Adobe Connect Blog

Yesterday, Adobe launched the Adobe Marketing Cloud “Metrics Not Myths” campaign.  This campaign aims to counter common statements hurled at Marketers like “Marketing is BS”, that it is hard to measure ROI on marketing investments.  Here is a funny video made for the campaign.

This “Metrics not Myths” plays well for webinars as well.  Up to 75% of all webinars are run for marketing purpose either to generate leads or to move prospect up the interest ladder.  Yet we found that marketers have difficulty measuring the ROI they are getting on their webinars or optimizing their webinar spend because they are getting an incomplete picture of the performance of their webinars.

For example, before the webinar, they typically can track which campaign draws the most registrations.  After the webinar, they can see who attended and who did not.  From the registration data they can qualify the lead based on demographics data.   But they can not tell which campaign generated the most qualified leads (and not just the most registration).  Was it the email invitation, the banner ads, the paid search keywords etc…?

Adobe Connect 9 Reporting

Enters Adobe Connect 9 and our integration with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud.  Out of the box, our webinar solution enables, marketers to identify the most qualified leads based not only on demographics data collected during registration, but also on behavioral data collected during the webinar.  We provide also reports that track which campaign brought these qualified leads to register, toattend the webinar, and help optimize the webinar spend the next time around.

With additional configurations, using Adobe’s Marketing Cloud Digital Analytics, our customers can correlate webinar data to their website traffic data, being able to identify which pages registrants looked at, which document did they download before attending the webinar.  This behavioral data can be used to further optimize the web path to get user to register for webinars or to further qualified leads based on behavior on the website.

Getting this insight is true gold for marketers and uniquely enabled by the close integration between Adobe Connect 9 and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud.

The Adobe Connect team is excited to announce that a newly updated version of the DCO Connect Mobile app is now available for Android devices! The latest update brings enhanced hosting controls for complete mobile-to-mobile collaboration and training, especially from tablet devices.

Originally launched in 2007, DCO (Defense Connect Online) leverages Adobe Connect web conferencing and instant messaging/presence via an XMPP client, to enable anywhere, anytime collaboration across over 700,000 users at the U.S. Department of Defense. Given the globally dispersed user base, and necessity to collaborate, train, and coordinate time critical efforts, it is not practical to expect users to be at a desk to initiate or drive virtual meetings or training. With this in mind, the updated DCO Connect Mobile app delivers even greater hosting, presenting, and sharing controls to completely drive collaboration and fulfill the many different use cases DoD personnel have for collaboration while operating in a mobile environment.

In addition to the existing features for tablets and smartphones (including hosting/attending meetings, participant management, 2-way video, VoIP, chat, and other interactive features), the updated capabilities include:

• Start, stop, and manage meeting audio and teleconferencing bridge
• Invite others to the meeting
• Start and stop recordings
• Enable web camera rights for all participants at once
• Switch between layouts in the meeting room
• Share content from share history
• Share content from Adobe Connect content library
• Share content from local device photo library or file storage (SD Card)
• Use drawing tools (pencil, highlighter, shapes) on whiteboard and on top of shared files/video
• Use emoticons: Raise Hand (B), Agree / Disagree (B), Speak Louder / Speak Softer, Speed Up / Slow Down, Laughter, Applause
• Stepped away indication appears when multi-tasking away from app
• Device phone number detected and populated when joining audio
• Participate in breakout rooms
(Most new features apply to tablets only; “B” indicates both smartphone and tablet)

Hosts can now whiteboard and annotate with the tip of a finger, change layouts, and foster interaction with a range of emoticons.

In addition to existing hosting controls (begin/end meetings, manage attendance, manage attendee roles – Host, Presenter, or Participant, etc.), hosts can now fully control meeting recordings, audio conferencing, and video.

Share presentations, videos, images and other content stored in your library in the cloud; in the image library; or on the device drive itself.

DCO Connect Mobile (version 2.0) is now available for free download on the Google Play Store.

The app supports the following devices and operating systems on Android:
- Devices: Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1), Nexus 7, Samsung Galaxy Tab (10.1), ASUS Transformer, Samsung Galaxy Tab (7”) , Motorola Xoom, Motorola Xoom 2
- Supported OS versions: 2.2 and higher
- AIR Runtime required: 3.2 or higher

For more information, please see these resources below:
Adobe Connect Mobile webpage
Getting Started Guide – Hosts and Presenters (Tablets)
Getting Started Guide – Hosts and Presenters (Smartphones)
Getting Started Guide – Participants (Tablets)
Getting Started Guide – Participants (Smartphones)

One of the great things about Adobe Connect is the terrific partner community that supports, resells, promotes, and innovates on Adobe Connect solutions. We were very excited when Adobe Connect partner, ConnectSolutions, was awarded the Chief Learning Officer Learning in Practice GOLD Award for Blended Technology, for their work with the Veterans Affairs Acquisition Academy (VAAA). The award was announced in a ceremony several weeks ago at the annual CLO Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The Learning in Practice Awards recognize industry leaders with demonstrated excellence in design and delivery of employee development programs. Awards are given to both practitioners and providers, in a variety of categories, including strategy, global learning, business impact, and blended technology.

“VAAA has a fantastic team of eLearning innovators,” said Michael Fitzpatrick, ConnectSolutions CEO/Co-Founder. “We love partnering with our customers to ensure things run flawlessly, which lets our customers do the things the care most about, like creating and developing innovative content.”

VAAA was created within the United State Department of Veterans Affairs to build a stronger workforce at the Veterans Administration, in the midst of budget cuts, workforce reductions and a high retirement rate. They are committed to best in class training and innovation, including a variety of learner engagement techniques, even creating their own games to integrate into training programs.

Elearning! Media Group hosted their Best of Elearning! awards this year, and it’s exciting to say that Adobe Connect has been named the 2012 winner in two categories – Best Virtual Classroom, and Best Web Seminar Solution. Even more exciting is that this is the fifth year in a row that we’ve come home with awards across these categories – winning Best Virtual Classroom in 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2012; Best Web Seminar Solution in 2010, 2011, and 2012; and an Award of Excellence for both categories in 2009.

But what’s most exciting is that the award winners are chosen by you – users of web conferencing and training products who vote via an open-ended ballot that Elearning! Media Group posts online, while we go head-to-head with other leading products in the industry. We’re honored to receive this recognition from our users, and looking forward to delivering more award winning innovations to you in the years to come!

Finally – we hope you’ll join us at the Adobe Learning Summit – happening October 29 in Las Vegas, NV.  Adobe product team experts, industry luminaries, and customers will present insights and practical skills and discuss innovations for a successful organization-wide learning program featuring Adobe solutions.  Registrations are open now!

A terrific case study on Adobe Connect’s widespread use across the U.S. Department of Defense was recently published by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), a nonprofit organization working to address challenges in energy and climate change. The U.S. government has come under pressure in recent years to achieve substantial cost savings and productivity improvements, due to severe budget constraints, as well as mandates to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gases. Jason Ye and Stephen Seidel from C2ES have published a full report on how the U.S. federal government is using information and communications technologies to address these challenges. The report includes a series of eight case studies around topics including shifting to cloud computing and redesigning workspaces, but most interesting to me was how the U.S. Department of Defense is leveraging Defense Connect Online (DCO), a service delivering web conferencing powered by Adobe Connect and instant messaging/presence via an XMPP client, enabling anywhere, anytime collaboration across over 700,000 users.

Leveraging DCO, the Department of Defense has been able to achieve benefits including a stronger system supporting continuity of operations (COOP), increases in telework, progress toward environmental and sustainability goals/mandates, and substantial cost savings with reductions in travel.

The report describes examples of some of the key use cases that DCO enables, such as command-and-control for military personnel to coordinate tactical battle planning, sharing information in real-time across ground, satellite, and air; and disaster relief scenarios, namely coordination of efforts during the 2010 Haiti earthquake across military units, non-profit organizations and multilateral organizations, to save lives and maximize relief an rescue efforts.

The complete report can be viewed here, with the case study of DCO available in pdf format here.

It is exciting to see such a powerful example of how Adobe Connect is helping to enable these types of achievements across the world. We look forward to working hard and enabling our customers to achieve greater and greater success.

Our newly released Adobe Connect Mobile 2.0 offers new and unlimited possibilities to take your web meetings to new levels.  This week we will take a look at how you can multi-screen your meetings.

One of the key trend in the digital home is multi-screen entertainment.  You can watch TV, but at the same time from a tablet or smartphone, chat or tweet with others watching the same program, or look-up some information about the players in the game or actors in the movie watched.

The same can now be done with Adobe Connect.  Log into your meeting from both your PC and your tablet for example  (Adobe Connect allows you to log as multiple hosts).  Set-up the meeting layout and manage the participants from the PC.  Control the slide changes from either the PC or your tablet.  But as soon as whiteboarding is required, use your tablet to whiteboard over the slides you uploaded from your PC.  You no longer need specialized equipment like a Wacom tablet to really be able to write complex math equations or draw complex objects faster: your finger (or a stylus) and a tablet will do the trick.

This opens a lot of brand new possibilities to take whiteboarding to a brand new level and make it much more useful to present information instead of relying to slides.

Happy whiteboarding everyone !

Last year, we had a very successful Adobe Connect User group for Government Customers in Wahsington DC.  To view a recap of the event, click here.  We are holding our second edition of this meeting next week, on September 19th in Washington DC.

If you are working in a Government agencies and are using Adobe Connect for telework or emergency response, continuity of operations, training or collaboration, you should plan on attending the event. We will be covering a lot of topics around the recent launch of Adobe Connect 9, how mobility is reshaping collaboration and e-learning:

• Discover the latest technical enhancements in Adobe Connect 9 and how it introduces innovations in comprehensive webinars, mobile collaboration, and mobile learning.
• Learn how to leverage your current video teleconferencing solutions to collaborate in the conference room and on your mobile device.
• Hear from and network with fellow colleagues about how they use Adobe Connect.
• Learn how to report, manage, and track to provide comprehensive results.
• Learn best practices for webcasts to enhance user experience.

But most importantly, you will be able to network with your peers using Adobe Connect and interact with the Adobe Connect Government Product Management team to give feed-back and provide input on what you would like to see in the future releases of the product.

As we know everyone is extremely busy, we kept the meeting to half a day from 8am to noon.  To learn more or register, follow this link: http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07e681kv3if3ec3d83&llr=y9xzrxdab

See you next week in DC !

Welcome back from your labor day break !  I hope you had a great summer.  If you have not paid attention to some of the announcements made by Adobe over the summer in the e-learning space, let me recap them briefly:

- Captivate 6 was introduced in July with the ability to publish to HTML5 , in order to publish e-learning content that can work cross devices.

- Presenter 8 was introduced in July part of the new e-Learning Suite release.  Along with Presenter 8 came an iOS app available for free on the app store.   It enables to play back Presenter authored content on any iOS device.

- Adobe Connect 9 was launched in August with the ability to support SCORM content and to support HTML5 content like the one out-put by Captivate 6.  It also introduced a brand new registration catalog based on Adobe CQ leading web content management platform.

- Connect Mobile 2.0 app became available both on the AppStore and Google Play as a free app.  It enables not only learners to attend a virtual classroom from any device, but most importably teacher to teach a class from any device, with the ability to whiteboard, load documents, change lay-outs etc…

All these announcements mean that today using all the tools that make up our Adobe Digital Learning Solution, you can author content that will run on any device, add this content in structured curriculum our courses, deploy these courses live or on-demand across any device and report on the pass/fail score but also on the effectiveness of the content.

We will talk more about this end to end e-learning solution for any device that we released over the summer at our coming e-Learning Summit.  To learn more or register, please visit:  http://bit.ly/MYEW9J

We’re tremendously excited to announce that our latest version of Adobe Connect Mobile, version 2.0, is now available for iOS and Android devices!

With the realities of today’s business environments where employees and customers are on the move worldwide, it’s not practical to expect that opportunities to collaborate or train only arise while in the office or at a desk. An effective web conferencing solution needs to provide users with the flexibility to not just participate in meetings, but to fully host, collaborate, and drive meetings from their mobile device.  It needs to enable trainers to not just provide learner access from any device, but also deliver that training from a mobile device.

With this in mind, we bring you Adobe Connect Mobile 2.0, offering meeting hosts and participants complete confidence to engage in web meetings, webinars, and virtual classrooms on the move using iOS or Android devices. We’ve extended many of the capabilities of previous releases with powerful new features, particularly on tablets. For example:

Complete meeting administration

In addition to existing hosting controls (begin/end meetings, manage attendance, manage attendee roles – Host, Presenter, or Participant, etc.), hosts can now fully control meeting recordings, audio conferencing, and video.

Share content from the cloud or device

Share presentations, videos, images and other content stored in your library in the cloud; in the image library; or on the device drive* itself (*Android).

Enhanced presentation controls and interactivity

In addition to existing presentation controls (presenting content, advancing slides, taking shared notes, running polls, etc.), hosts can now whiteboard with the tip of a finger, change layouts, and foster interaction with a range of emoticons.

Adobe Connect Mobile 2.0 is now available for free download on iTunes Preview here, and the Google Play Store here.

The app supports the following devices and operating systems:

Apple:

-               Devices: iPad, iPad2, iPad3; iPhone 4 and 4 S, iPod touch (3rd generation minimum recommended)

-               Supported OS versions: iOS 4.3.x, 5.x, or 6.x (5.x or higher recommended)

Android:

-               Devices: Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1), Nexus 7, Samsung Galaxy Tab (10.1), ASUS Transformer, Samsung Galaxy Tab (7”) , Motorola Xoom, Motorola Xoom 2.

-               Supported OS versions:  2.2 and higher.

-               AIR Runtime required: 3.2 or higher

Adobe Connect Mobile 2.0 is not yet available for BlackBerry Playbook, but please stay tuned for updates.  Our 1.7.5 version continues to be available here in BlackBerry App World.

For more information on Adobe Connect Mobile visit our Adobe Connect Mobile User Forum on connectusers.com. We look forward to your thoughts—in comments, on Twitter @AdobeConnect, and on our mobile user forum.

Cheers and enjoy,

Randah McKinnie, Principal Product Manager

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.