Adobe Connect Blog

The use of videoconferencing in business has been on the rise over the last few years, but it wasn’t until recently that the Department of Defense (DOD) started heavily pushing for its use in its day-to-day operations. In the past, the DOD’s enterprise collaboration tool, Defense Connect Online (DCO), which is powered by Adobe Connect, had been used primarily to supplement physical conferences.

Recently, Federal Computer Week magazine sat down with our Mike Murtha, who manages the DCO program here at Adobe to discuss the DCO program. Mike reiterated the increased demand by the DOD to use videoconferencing to replace physical meetings and conferences. “Over the past three months, we have gotten a lot of inquiries [saying]: ‘We want to run an entire conference virtually,’” Murtha said.

FCW also discussed barriers that were in place that discouraged the use of videoconferencing such as costs, security concerns, and infrastructure requirements. The article noted that an advantage that Adobe Connect offers is that its services also provide videoconferencing capabilities for both desktops and mobile devices. Mike mentioned that the DCO system wasn’t initially built for videoconferencing, but that the customers are pushing it in that direction.

To read more about how federal agencies are promoting the use of videoconferencing, click here.

By Francesca Lohman, senior product marketing manager

A prominent research firm recently estimated that only 4 percent of U.S. information workers use Web conferencing on a daily basis.

It got me to thinking about the ways we use Adobe Connect here at the company. Granted, I work on the product team – and everyone at Adobe has what essentially amounts to an unlimited license – but what is it that makes working this way so fundamental and basic to us, like using email or IM? Admittedly, we’re “alpha-users”, but much of what we’re doing is worth consideration by our customers.

I participate in Adobe Connect meetings several times a day, every day; not one goes by when I’m not either hosting or attending. I estimate that on average, I’m in Adobe Connect meetings 4 -5 hours a day… wow!

A few thoughts/examples, some more serious than others:

• Even when meeting casually (e.g., sharing info or brainstorming), I’ll often jump into my Adobe Connect room so the other person can see the notes I’m capturing — and maybe (hopefully?) take the content more seriously. 
• As a team, we have all of our meetings (even with everyone physically present) via Adobe Connect. This may sound odd – sitting around a conference table but using Adobe Connect as the meeting progresses – but in doing so, we can share anything without delay, see notes in real time, capture actions on the fly, chat without disturbing the speaker, and record the whole thing for those unable to attend.
• Persistent meeting rooms let me house past agendas and quickly prepare new ones (“Agghh, the meeting starts in three minutes!”) – no need to go searching for notes.
• My meetings are stacked up or I need to multi-task and don’t want to be rude? Sometimes undocking and running to a conference room on the other side of the building or another building altogether is unnecessary – I’ll join via Adobe Connect, and feel more productive as a result.
• Our IT help desk staff uses Adobe Connect for internal Adobe desktop support and troubleshooting. I can’t imagine how much time (both mine and theirs) has been saved by remote screensharing and, when needed, relinquishing control of my system. I’ve even picked up a few tips along the way – like the famous C: prompt (fun fun)!
• We were evaluating logo gear to support the recent launch of Adobe Connect 8 – I was in San Jose and wanted to provide input, while other teammates were in our San Francisco office.  I needed to see the samples to help select what would be best and keep the process moving.  No brainer: Adobe Connect video pod – very clear and real-time. Done. Next.
• Video is great for closing distances – we routinely use it for critical communications, but it can also provide a more light-hearted moment from time-to-time.  A colleague in the U.K. who was working from home once pointed his camera toward his backyard to prove that it was, in fact, NOT raining in London that day. He forgot his laundry was drying on the line, though, and needless to say was more than a bit embarrassed by the sight he broadcast to us. We still laugh about it today. Kidding aside, a lot can be lost through just a phone conference…something we never struggle with here.

Our slogan used to be, “The next best thing to meeting in person.” Now we meet in person and use Adobe Connect at the same time. Are we addicted or is it just too useful?  I don’t know, but I’ll let you know when a work day goes by that I don’t use and truly gain from it – just don’t expect to hear from me anytime soon.

Do you have other examples to share of day-to-day uses you couldn’t do without? Mine is by no means an exhaustive list; would love to hear from you in comments.

Cheers,

Francesca

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

We’re very pleased to announce that Adobe Connect 8 is now available!

On premise customers who are eligible for upgrades will receive an email from us in the coming seven to 10 days with more detail about their upgrade. Additionally, we’ve begun migrating hosted deployments in North America to the new version, will continue a phased rollout over the coming months, and will include hosted customers in other parts of the world in early 2011.

Adobe Connect 8 features a wealth of new and enhanced features and benefits, including a simplified interface for greater usability and enhanced audio and video capabilities for richer experiences. A new software development kit (SDK) offers greater extensibility, the optional Adobe Connect Desktop client (now available for free download here) makes meeting management easier, and Adobe Connect Mobile—available for Apple iOS and Google Android platforms—supports a range of mobile devices for those attending meetings on the go.

For our current customers, there are some great, informative resources available at the Adobe Connect 8 Migration Center, including a migration timeframe indicator for hosted customers, a transition guide, details about the SDK, and an ability to sign up for a 30-day preview account. Please do check out the site.

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.

We believe Adobe Connect 8 will help you collaborate more effectively, work more efficiently and deliver better results. We’re looking forward to sharing the product with you, starting now.

The Adobe Connect Team

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

In mid-June, Adobe will be releasing Service Pack 3 for Connect Pro 7. This is a maintenance release that includes several bug fixes across all Connect Pro application modules including Acrobat Connect Pro Meeting, Training, Events, and Server.
Visit ConnectUsers.com to learn more about what is in SP3.
http://www.connectusers.com/news/index.php?cmd=display_news&id=2688