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

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

I am pleased to announce that Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile is now available for FREE download!
With this release, Connect Pro Mobile offers users mobile access via an iPhone or iPod touch to rich communications including collaborative meetings, training sessions and Web seminars. We anticipate iPad users will be able to take advantage of Connect Pro Mobile as well. For more information on iPad applications with Flash, click here.
Connect Pro Mobile was built using a pre-release of the next version of Flash Pro and was published as a native iPhone application. In fact, we’re the first publicly available Adobe-authored application that uses the Packager for iPhone technology! Plus, because Connect Pro Mobile was created using Flash, we will also be able to use the same code to deliver this application on other mobile devices when AIR for mobile devices becomes available. Last week at Mobile World Congress, we demo’d Connect Pro on a number of devices, including Android.
With Connect Pro Mobile, participants can watch and listen to live presentations including real-time meeting webcam video and screen sharing demonstrations. Mobile users can see who is in the meeting at any given time, and collaborate with others using live text chat. VoIP meeting audio will broadcast straight to iPhone or iPod touch devices over a WiFi or 3G connection. Meeting hosts also have the ability to give participants the option to join a telephone conference call, and even opt to have the conference dial out to the mobile user, eliminating the need to enter complex dialing codes.
See it in action:

If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, I encourage you to download this FREE application and enjoy immediate access to meetings anytime, anywhere. To learn more, please view the Connect Pro Mobile overview video or visit the Connect Pro Mobile support forum.

Since its wider adoption by enterprises and organizations of various sizes, Web conferencing has represented a quantum leap compared with traditional audio-only conference calls. The online meeting experience creates a new level of participant engagement by adding rich data sharing (screensharing, collaborative review of documents) and interactivity tools (chat, live surveys, etc.). Higher participant attention raises the productivity of online meetings, while the combination of live sessions and on-demand access to learning contents increases the retention rate of training sessions administered through tools like Connect Pro.
Through periodic research interviews, we have found that many Connect Pro customers would characterize our solution as “the next best thing to a face-to-face meeting”. This is the result of constant innovation instilled into our product over seven releases to deliver a multi-dimensional environment.

While audio, text-based chat and data sharing are staples of web conferencing tools, video is the one dimension that has been relatively underutilized until now. Two major reasons explain this lower penetration: the slow proliferation of video devices, such as webcams, in the workplace, and the concern of systems administrators around bandwidth utilization. Another reason would be the earlier investment in room-based videoconferencing systems by corporations and the urge to use them as the primary conduit for visual communications, as a way to justify their high acquisition costs and the recurring expenses for servicing them.

From connecting rooms to connecting people

While room-based videoconferencing systems arguably provide good quality video, they have failed to do so in a scalable fashion, financially and operationally. Beyond the cost of installing and maintaining endpoints, IT/IS departments have realized that room-based systems are another complex layer to manage and to integrate with the rest of their communications infrastructure. On the other end, many corporate users often struggle with their sophisticated deployment and convoluted settings.

Leading vendors have recently touted a new generation of videoconferencing solutions, with “Telepresence”, emphasizing high quality at improved compression rates. However, these systems have not overcome the barriers that limit the widespread use of video: complex combination of hardware, software and additional room equipment; price points that make them an elitist solution and the privilege of a few. Finally they still follow the same metaphor consisting in connecting rooms, not users.

A study recently published by Gartner (November 10, 2009) portends that organizations are showing increased interest in video in general, and in video systems that are not bound to a room-centered experience in particular. They are pushing harder for desktop videoconferencing that has a lower cost structure, better reach and less dependence on appliances and infrastructure.

Seeing is believing

The video streaming capabilities provided by Connect Pro make it a strong substitute to supplant these systems down the road, and a much better fit for interpersonal communications. As webcams and built-in video devices are making strong headways into corporate environments, video will become the next frontier of web conferencing systems.

Release after release, and ahead of all competing products, Connect Pro team has supported and improved live video streaming to create more lifelike web meeting experiences and foster ad-hoc collaboration. Seeing the presenters of a webinar, or the instructor conducting a training session over Connect Pro, helps make a more impactful and lasting impression on the target audience.

Built on the Adobe Flash platform, Connect Pro leverages the leading streaming technologies developed by Adobe, currently used to deliver approximately 80 percent of Web video worldwide. Adobe Flash has been designed to provide high-quality streaming, at optimized bitrates, across firewalls. Bandwidth efficiency mitigates administrators’ network-related concerns while cross-firewall delivery extends video meetings to outside participants.

Mass adoption of video by enterprise customers is occurring gradually, but its pace is accelerating. It will increasingly rely on fully software-based videoconferencing solutions that offer lower-cost alternatives to legacy video systems with roughly equivalent levels of quality. With the ubiquitous Flash platform, Connect Pro possesses a foundational asset that we are leveraging as we evolve our webconferencing solution. Stay tuned for richer and more engaging interpersonal and collaborative experiences.

By Vincent Toesca

The Connect Pro team released today three new whitepapers addressing key topics of interest for its hosted and licensed customers. A first set of documents provide an updated security assessment for Connect Pro 7.5; another whitepaper focuses on our support for virtualized server environments.
Security – Collaborate in trust with Connect Pro

Leading organizations are increasingly using realtime collaboration tools, such as Connect Pro, to increase employee productivity and optimize their costs of doing business. While enhanced business velocity is the primary objective, systems security, data integrity and privacy protection are vital imperatives for systems administrators.

Adobe has for long acknowledged that software applications and services must be delivered in a secure and reliable fashion. As part of this commitment to transparency, Adobe released today an updated version of its security reports (one for its SaaS platform, one for its premise-based software). The new documents can be found at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/whitepapers/

Customers will find that, from design to systems deployment, Connect Pro implements best practices for software security at all stages of its engineering development and operations. All Connect Pro application components, whether delivered as a service or licensed software, go through a rigorous process of validation, conducted side-by-side by Adobe’s dedicated, in-house security team and third-party security experts.

In addition to the techniques employed to ensure communications encryption and protection against security exploits, it is important to note that Connect Pro also offers leading features for compliance and control. They give systems administrators a tighter control over the functionality accessible to end-users and are useful to mitigate the risk of accidental sharing of sensitive information and ensure alignment with internal and regulatory policies. More details can be found in a tutorial published on our community website, at www.connectusers.com.
 

Virtualization – Optimize resources with Connect Pro

Server virtualization is becoming the norm across many data centers. The overall level of virtualization has increased steadily over the past years and is widely seen as a valuable avenue for cutting costs and improving resource utilization in the data center.

Four main reasons are driving this uptake:

1. Server consolidation and data center optimization: by consolidating several workloads on a single, partitioned server and running them each in their own VM, more efficient utilization can be achieved while still allocating sufficient resources to execute each workload. This also allows for substantial savings on data center costs and space.
2. Business continuity: the deployment and management of applications on virtualization software offers more cost-efficient options for high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery.
3. Encapsulation and isolation: by creating separate operating environments for multiple applications, virtualization technology mitigates the risk of conflict, facilitates the troubleshooting of runtime problems and achieve security isolation.
4. Dynamic utility computing: virtualization can turn previously discrete IT resources into an internal utility grid that saves energy, reduces cost and increases reliability.

To take advantage of the benefits of virtualized server architectures, Connect Pro 7.5 has been certified in a virtualized server environment running VMware ESX Server.

The new whitepaper, published at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/whitepapers/, offers benchmarks and data points about the application’s performance in a virtual environment, under different configurations (single server setup, clustered three-server setup). It was found that Connect Pro performed on par with an equivalent physical installation and that the user experience was comparable.

This whitepaper also advises customers on the best way to set up and configure Acrobat Connect Pro on VMware ESX Server.

By Vincent Toesca