Adobe Connect Blog

We’ve written a lot lately about the extensibility of Adobe Connect; here’s a guest perspective from RefinedData’s Terry Shane

Let’s face it, the last thing we need is another web conferencing solution! Hardly a month goes by without yet another vendor offering a solution for “virtual meetings”.  How can you choose between a growing and bewildering list of products that all claim to offer the “best” solution? An odd way to start a post about Adobe Connect, but it’s an important point.

What makes smartphones “smart” is that they’re platforms on which third parties can build applications. Today’s phones can be remote control devices, trading platforms, game consoles, GPS systems, video cameras – anything someone can dream up – even a web conferencing interface!

Similarly, it’s this kind of extensibility that differentiates Adobe Connect from other web conferencing solutions – the ability to solve business problems with custom applications that operate inside of live and recorded meetings.

Extensibility enables business applications allowing multiple participants to collaborate in ways that are not possible outside of Adobe Connect. Other web conferencing tools are the equivalent of phones with limited functions, not supporting the ability of developers to build new tools and features.

You may be aware of extensions for Adobe Connect, tools that increase functionality and/or increase engagement. For example, there are extensions that calculate the carbon or cost savings for meetings or stream live video from external sources.

These custom pods can interact with external network services such as Google Maps, Yahoo! stock feeds, Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, PayPal or any internet- or intranet-based API. An extension can pull data from these (and other) sources, as well as push data back. A feature unique to Adobe Connect – viewers of recorded meetings may work with these tools as well; they can be written to differentiate between a live event and a recording.

Consider what could be.

The possibilities are impressive – here are some ideas:

HR: On-boarding forms or employee surveys that are submitted directly back to the corporate database and create PDF versions that are emailed to the user.

Fund raising: Allow attendees of a fund-raising webinar to make donations within the live event or when watching the recording.

Custom shopping: Enter a product SKU and receive images, descriptions, pricing and inventory availability. Purchases executed in real-time without leaving the meeting room via integrated credit card transactions. Hosts could monitor purchases (without seeing sensitive info) and be able to offer incentives or limit the purchasing opportunity.

Sales: A viewer of a recorded event is able to enter a phone number for a call back from a salesperson or call center. The extension is sophisticated enough to recognize the user’s IP address, determine country and time-zone, check if the local center is open and average wait time, and automatically arrange the call back or generate a live call.

I’m just scratching the surface, but if you’d like to suggest some of your own ideas (via comments below or by sending me an email), I’ll present some of the most innovative in a future post. There really is no limit and I’d love to see what we can come up with.

Terry Shane, CEO, Refined Data Solutions (terry@refineddata.com)

By Guillaume Privat, Director Product Management, Adobe Connect

A year ago, we launched the Adobe Connect ideas website to capture your inputs on what we should build in the product.  So far the feed-back has been great and we have already implemented many ideas in our C8, C8.1 and C8.2 releases.  Some ideas however are a better fit for 3rd party developers leveraging our SDK.

We have added categories and statuses to the idea site to help surface these ideas.  So whether you are a developer in search of inspiration to create a custom pod, or would like to submit custom pod ideas, read on for some suggestion on how to do this.

Adding a custom pod idea

Say you are a user of Adobe Connect and have an idea for a potential extension, for instance an Angry Birds collaborative pod: just log to the Adobe Connect Idea site with your Adobe ID, create a new idea by clicking on “post idea”.  Fill in the title and the description and select the category “custom pod”.  Submit.  Look at responses from the community on your idea. Simple and easy.

Viewing suggested ideas

If you are a developer in search of inspiration, the Adobe Connect ideas website can provide that inspiration.  Go the ideas site, and on the right side panel filter by either category = “custom pod” or status = “For SDK developer”.  Review the idea and post comments (you will need to log in using your Adobe ID to do so) to request more feedback on the idea.

To vote on my Angry Bird idea, vote here !

In our recent discussion about web conferencing and extensibility, we’ve talked about real-world users – including California State University Chancellor’s Office, New Horizons Computer Learning Centers and Tat Communication – who are realizing value by extending the Adobe Connect platform and using our custom extensions.

One way this is happening is by incorporating custom meeting pods: specialized, in-meeting applications (pods) that are either built by our own product folks, partners or external developers.  Our published software development kits (see: Adobe Connect Developer Center) let developers create new and interesting pods that can live natively within Adobe Connect – this capability is entirely unique, increasing capabilities that address specific needs and interests and making web meetings more engaging.

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how easy it is to integrate extensions into an Adobe Connect meeting room.

Demo: Personalize Meeting Rooms

I’ve created a demo that shows how easy it is to start leveraging the extensibility of Adobe Connect by adding custom pods to your meeting room – check it out:

There is more information, including currently available custom pods, at our extensions and integrations page here.

Get Started

Screen sharing is not really collaborating, which is why, over time, we’ve focused on the flexibility of Adobe Connect. The ability to integrate custom pods and customize meeting rooms gives our customers a great advantage – we encourage you to experiment with many of our free custom pods such as the popular TwitterConnect.

It’s still early, but we’re definitely expecting great creativity from developers, and more engaging and useful meetings for all.

Stay in touch with us here and on Twitter @AdobeConnect as we continue to share news and views on extensibility and a wide range of web conferencing topics.

-Peter Ryce, Senior Technical Evangelist (@PeterRyce)

Continuing on the theme of extensibility and web conferencing — including recent, related posts on California State University Chancellor’s Office and New Horizons Computer Learning Centers — today we’re showcasing yet another organization taking advantage of this capability to produce for clients.

Tat Communication wanted to find a way to deliver higher-quality online meetings as cost effectively as possible. The goal was to offer customers rich, dynamic webinars—while being sensitive to expense.

Adobe Connect combined with Refined Data’s Talking Stick custom meeting pod (for enhanced video and audio functionality) is helping Tat deliver high-end, engaging productions that draw an average of 300 participants per session. Clients are engaging staff and partners, while Tat is carving a niche and creating competitive advantage.

Check out the full story here.

More to come on extensibility – please stay in touch with us here and on Twitter: @AdobeConnect as we continue to share stories, news and views on a wide range of web conferencing topics.

The world of web conferencing is evolving. Quickly.

While many think of web conferencing as simple screen sharing — sharing PowerPoint and “passing the ball” from one presenter to the next—that’s a limited interaction that hasn’t changed much in 10 years.

In contrast, we’re seeing organizations expanding what they’re doing and what they expect from online meeting solutions. Beyond simple screen sharing, they’re enabling more effective collaboration, supporting a range of use cases throughout their enterprises, and in some cases, managing highly specialized interactions such as guided selling, telemedicine and cross-border disaster recovery coordination – to name a few.

We’re glad to be right there with them, helping support and lead this movement toward a broad and rapidly growing range of more advanced use cases. We’ve taken an open approach with our product development over time and focused efforts on creating a rich, flexible solution that integrates well with other systems and is highly extensible. Our APIs, free SDKs and other developer resources encourage development and enable customization. We encourage you to read on for more about our perspective on extensibility, our ecosystem that’s growing around it, what a few of our customers have accomplished, and how you can get your hands on the latest and greatest.

Market Trend – Customization

In this video, Arun Anantharaman, our VP and GM of Adobe Connect (@arunster), discusses overarching trends in web conferencing including increasing demands for customization and solutions that integrate with other systems.

Extensions Ecosystem

We’ve built out a unique extensions ecosystem. Looking at the image below, dark blue represents areas where ours is the only solution that provides such extensions, and light blue where we’re one of few that offer the capabilities. Several vendors, including Adobe, provide integrations to other systems and mobile support.

We’ve divided extensions into seven groups:

• Integrations:  integrations with audio, CRM, chat, learning management and other systems
• Custom Meeting Pods: specialized, in-meeting applications; either pre-built or custom
• Custom Solutions: end-to-end solutions — e.g., guided selling, telemedicine
• Deployment: managed, single tenant version of Adobe Connect offered via Amazon cloud
• Video Teleconferencing: integration with several video-teleconferencing systems
• Mobile Devices: support for mobility platforms — e.g., iOS, Android, Blackberry PlayBook
• Adobe Technologies: utilization of Adobe technologies including Flash and AIR

For more information and to download the very latest, see our extensions and integrations page here.

Customer Uses

The extensibility of Adobe Connect is a direct response to the real-world requirements of customers — the need to solve unique business problems, and to have personalized experiences. Here are a few great examples:

• The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency, uses Adobe Connect and a specialized extension from our partner, RefinedData to support simultaneous interpretation, allowing multi-lingual, interactive remote online meeting participation; see their press release

• The California State University Chancellor’s Office has standardized on Adobe Connect and in-meeting extensions to improve collaboration with rich video and save travel expense while lightening environmental impact; check out their story here

• A high-profile political event recently incorporated our TwitterConnect custom pod in its Adobe Connect large-scale webinar solution to include conversation with supporters and elevate community building

Developers

The Adobe Connect Developer Center has the free SDKs, APIs and learning materials developers need to get started extending capabilities; additional resources include tutorials and a forum.

Looking Forward

We have many customers using Adobe Connect in conjunction with key extensions to realize value today. And we’re definitely looking forward to what the creativity of developers and our customers brings to bear as we move forward. Please do stay in touch.

Best regards,

-Michael Londgren, Director, Product Marketing, Adobe Connect (@MichaelLondgren)

-Peter Ryce, Senior Technical Evangelist, Adobe Connect (@PeterRyce)

In Adobe Connect 8, we introduced a new aspect ratio that allows for optimum viewing. The Adobe Connect meeting interface rescales intelligently to provide optimum viewing experiences for any screen size or resolution.

We’ve received great feedback on this change that enables the product to scale but maintain aspect ratio. At the same time, users who created customized wallpapers for Adobe Connect 7.5 or earlier may have noticed them stretching the original branded appearance. With that in mind, I wanted to share some tips for those who like the ability to customize and brand their Adobe Connect meetings (and also point you to some of our own backgrounds…but more on that later):

-          Background file types supported are: JPG, PNG, GIF and SWF.

-          The name of the background file should be 50 characters or less.

-          The background scales with the size of the meeting client window. Different client views are determined by screen resolution.

-          Aspect ratio is always honored, which means the largest dimension dominates so there is never a blank space. Keep in mind, this is what can cause an image to truncate.

-          You can use Adobe Illustrator to create a vector-based wallpaper image that scales beautifully at any size. You should save for web and choose SWF as the format. SWF backgrounds are very lightweight but the trick is getting the aspect ratio correct – again, Adobe Connect 8 meetings are no longer of a fixed ratio and, as a result, it may take some tweaking as you go.

-          Use a higher resolution when creating pixel-based wallpaper images in Photoshop. You’ll typically achieve better results scaling down than scaling up. We recommend using 1920×1200, which works well – note this means it will scale down on monitors with lower resolutions and scale up on 27″+ monitors.  (Bear in mind bitmaps are not supported).

-          It’s best to keep the background file size small. The size of the background file impacts required bandwidth and attendees will download this file as part of joining the meeting.

-          As a best practice, in large meetings of over 300 participants, hosts should consider removing backgrounds, which saves bandwidth usage and results in a better participant experience for those on slower connections or older computers.

-          Adobe Connect 8 offers a larger viewing area so it’s also quite simple to add an additional share pod where you can upload a simple .PPTX with your preferred branding. This looks great, for example, in the upper right-hand corner of an Adobe Connect meeting room. (See image below)

As I alluded earlier, we’ve created some nice Adobe Connect backgrounds ourselves that you can download from the ConnectUsers.com site here and place in your Adobe Connect room (to download, click on the gallery thumbnail image of interest, then right-click on the large image and choose “Save Image As…” from your browser). Backgrounds in Adobe Connect are associated with a particular room only to allow multiple users within an account to brand as they wish.

To change the default background in an Adobe Connect meeting, as a host, go to the top menu.

1. Choose Meeting > Preferences.
2. Click upload, then navigate to the desired image. If you haven’t previously added the file to Adobe Connect, click Browse My Computer.

It is important when creating a background to note there is a way to anchor your background to one of the four corners.  The default anchor point is the bottom left corner.

For example, if you want to fit a square image in a 4:3 Adobe Connect meeting room window like the sample below, choose a background where you place the logo in the bottom left corner.

Since the anchor default is the bottom left corner, you can see the image fits nicely.

If you find your image is being cropped on the top or side, you can change the anchor point to the corner that best suits your background image. To change the anchor point, in your Adobe Connect Meeting room, go to Meeting > Preferences and you will see a box that looks like the image below. Double click on the preview image (see red rectangle in image below). This will change the anchor point. Watch your image closely after double clicking and you will see the adjustments to the background in the window.  Please note anchor points can be similarly changed for SWF files used as background images, however note the preview image is not updated in the preview window.

I hope you’ll find this post helpful and of interest, and that you’ll check out and enjoy the backgrounds I discussed. As always, let us know your thoughts in comments and on Twitter @AdobeConnect and @ConnectSupport.

Amy Brooks, Adobe Connect Event Producer