Adobe Connect Blog

In marketing, we tend to use a lot of text and PowerPoint slides to communicate. While that can be effective, I always find myself wanting to jump out of “slide” mode and into “demo” mode – especially when discussing Adobe Connect and web conferencing.

Adobe Connect – particularly the new version 8 – was created with the customer experience in mind. It makes more sense for me to show you the powerful features instead of trying to describe them. A picture is worth a thousand words – and video uses about 30 pictures every second.

With that in mind, I’ve created this video walkthrough of Adobe Connect 8, including enhancements from Service Pack 1, in which I can show you what makes this product a joy to use every day.

Is it the content, the environment, the instructor or facilitator, your peers, expert speakers, best practices, a sense of community, opportunities to network, is it what you actually learn & take away, or what you end up applying after the fact? When you think of powerful learning experiences, what do you remember most?

Often it’s not just one thing, but rather a harmony of many components, all working well together, often by design. Learning is a sophisticated experience that requires sophisticated design in order to be effective. This is particularly true when we design for virtual learning environments. It’s easy to gauge engagement when you can see your learner’s eyes sitting before you in a classroom. It’s not so easy when your learners are spread out globally across multiple time zones, all participating virtually in a synchronous event.

Last week we presented at ASTD’s TechKnowledge 2011 conference. Our presentation Foundations of Leadership: A Blended-Learning Approach to Building A Leadership Pipeline highlighted some of our best practices for driving engagement in virtual learning. The virtual learning component of our Foundations of Leadership program is administered entirely leveraging the superior instructional capability of Adobe Connect. We’d like to share a summary of best practices from our presentation, which focus on operational excellence from both program and virtual-learning-experience perspectives.

• Practice Makes Perfect. When you’re scheduling across multiple time zones, it’s a good idea to perform a few dry-runs prior to your scheduled event to ensure everything works properly, your partners on the ground locally (if you have them) are prepared, and to get a general sense of timing and flow. Spend your run-though focusing on transitions between technology and presentation content to ensure things look/act the way you imagined them. Think about a contingency plan in case you experience any difficulty with your presentation. Will you have a back-up deck preloaded separately or will you be ready to screen share locally? Think about learning continuity and for critical content ask, “What will I do if…?”

• Strength in Numbers. Have a team help you administer/execute the session. We’ve found this to be extremely helpful to ensuring a quality learning experience. Giving your instructor/facilitator the room to focus on delivering the content and staying on time/target ensures your learners won’t miss anything critical, but it also lessens the cognitive load for having your facilitator simultaneously manage learner collaboration with content presentation. Having a dedicated chat monitor/moderator can streamline Q&A time as well. Teach your chat monitor how to consolidate questions/themes so your time spent answering questions and discussing is optimized. Where possible, also think about enlisting a dedicated technical representative to help troubleshoot basic user issues behind the scenes.

• Subject Matter Networks. When you’re delivering global virtual learning, you can’t expect to have all the answers. At conception, consider forming a diverse cross-functional advisory council to help you drive momentum and get consensus on critical decision points along the way. This is a great way to build community around your project, grow credibility & buy-in, build program evangelists and provide status updates while you drive to execution. Try to get local representation from each location you plan to serve with your program and most importantly, make participation in the council accessible, which may mean late nights, early mornings and/or duplicate meetings to serve your colleagues overseas.

• Baby Steps are Big Steps. You may not be an expert at delivering virtual learning now, but practice and practice again. Start by leveraging Adobe Connect for virtual collaboration with your team, and where possible, try first with a simple peer-to-peer experience with a colleague who’s also eager to learn the solution as well. Getting comfortable with the power & nuances of the platform will give you the confidence to build up to delivering virtual learning globally. Consider a hybrid approach to your weekly team meetings as a way to build capability and confidence in your team as you transition to the instructional capabilities of Adobe Connect.

• I Approve This Message. Ships don’t sail themselves. Building a world-class development program requires world-class sponsorship. Ensuring executive sponsorship for your program sends a message to all potential participants (and their managers) that learning is not only important, but valued, by your company’s senior leadership. Hopefully you know the micro-celebrities that have huge political capital across your organization – ask them to sponsor your initiative at conception. Work on your elevator pitch once you’ve honed your idea into something that has clear momentum with your team. Focus on critical business objectives and explain how your learning initiative will help address them.

We’d love to learn about successes—and challenges—around delivering virtual learning, too! What are your best practices and tips for driving learner engagement and delivering an effective virtual learning experience? Let us know in comments.

Justin Mass, Senior Learning Technologist, Adobe (@jmass)
Angela Szymusiak, Senior Learning Consultant, Adobe

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.

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