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.

Defense Connect Online (DCO), the Adobe Connect and XMPP chat deployment at the US Department of Defense run by the Defense System Information Agency (DISA) has been nominated for 2012 Excellence.Gov awards by the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council.

The charter of the awards is to promote “excellence in advancing the business of government through technology”.  DCO is nominated in the excellence in intergovernmental collaboration. The award recognizes programs that were designed and/or operated with close cooperation and coordination between different levels of government. Examples: social service programs that are funded and overseen by the Federal government but implemented by state and/or local governments; emergency response programs that require cooperation between various governments.

DISA is a combat support agency that plans, engineers, and maintains global net-centric solutions serving a diverse group of autonomously managed United States Department of Defense (DoD) enterprises. These include the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Combatant Commands, and the nation’s military branches.  It launched DCO in 2008 as a collaboration service available to all DoD personel.  Since then hundreds of thousands of users signed up for the service.  DCO supports a large number of operations worldwide ranging from tactical war fighting to day-to-day office use, briefings, mission rehearsals, one-to-one and group on-the-spot collaboration, training, eLearning, and dozens of other functions.

Adobe Connect was selected to power the DCO solution because of its secure architecture and ability to run in a completely secured cloud.  Yet, because of its ease of entry into a meeting, it enables to quickly bring together users from multiple government agencies or even NGOs into a situation room and use that room persistence for both real time and as well as a-synchronous collaboration.

Last summer based on the success of the program, DISA expanded DCO though a $90million dollar contract, possibly the largest contract in the web-conferencing industry.

If you are interested to learn more about DCO, take a look at our case study and or follow DCO on Facebook.

- Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect