Adobe Connect Blog

Much recent discussion about web conferencing on this blog has centered on the extensibility of Adobe Connect and how our open approach to product development over time has delivered a rich, flexible solution that integrates well with other systems while solving real world challenges for wide range of customers.

Along this theme, many enterprises with particular requirements for security and compliance – especially those in government or highly regulated industries (e.g. financial services) – have turned to virtualization solutions to simplify desktop and application management, and ultimately increase control and security (the IT crowd loves this).

A lot of organizations have turned to VMware for these reasons. With VMware View (VMware VDI), desktop administrators virtualize the operating system, applications and user data to deliver desktops to end-users. Centralized automated management of these components increases control and improves business agility while providing a flexible, high-performance desktop experience, across a variety of network conditions.

Adobe and VMware teamed up to validate Adobe Connect 8 on VMware View 4.6 with the following goals:

• Verify that the Adobe Connect client can launch web-based meetings successfully from a VMware View desktop
• Verify that participants can view shared screens and documents with high quality
• Verify that multiple VMware View desktop sessions running on the same host can simultaneously present

The validation took place at VMware’s labs in Palo Alto in August.

Whitepaper

A joint white paper has been issued that describes the testing carried out jointly by VMware and Adobe. “Validating Adobe Connect Client on VMWare® View Desktops” provides technical considerations for running an Adobe Connect client in VMWare View desktops in order to participate in Adobe Connect web-based meetings. It also offers best practice recommendations for successful deployments:

• You can download the white paper from Adobe here.
• Alternately, you can download it from VMware here.

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

-Sanjay Agrawal, Senior Product Manager

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