Over the past year, recognition continued to roll in for Adobe Connect. Another great review that came in at the end of 2012 was from Network World.
Network World conducted side-by-side comparisons of eight of the leading Web conferencing vendors and ranked Adobe Connect in a tie for first. The Network World web conferencing vendor test ranked the services according to four scenarios ranging from meetings of two to five people to large scale webinars.
We were excited to see the areas where the review praised Adobe Connect, including the ability to host large-scale webinars calling it a “post-conferencing reporting powerhouse.” Network World also noted “Connect also has the strongest features when it came to measuring audience engagement and supporting archival meeting content.” Other areas where Network World positioned Adobe Connect above other offerings were the recording options available, including the ability to record the chats and participants names, and its mobile client, noting its “consistent user interfaces and clean look.”
In addition, the review discussed persistent URLs for Adobe Connect meeting rooms, calling them “handy when a team is working over a period of time on a set of documents.” As our customers know, this feature is also useful for setting up last-minute, ad hoc meetings.
Another area the review considered was the audio options each service provides. Our own Alistair Lee recently blogged about our Universal Voice feature, which lets users leverage VoIP or their audio provider of choice.
We’re interested in what you have to say, though, after you give the roundup review a read. Let us know what stands out, good and bad, and what you’d like to see more of from us moving forward.
Last week, I published a sneak peek showing you some incredible new features that will enable customers to build landing pages to register participants for their events. I’ve seen some stunning examples and these features are largely powered by Adobe CQ5.
It’s not the whole story though. When we spoke to customers about the workflow for their marketing webinars and other events, they spoke about the need to measure the success of these events. Getting people to your event is one part of the equation – analyzing the data after the event is another.
It turns out that Adobe is already an industry leader in web-based analytics through it’s acquisition of Omniture in 2009. In this sneak peek, I’ll show you how a future version of Adobe Connect can leverage Adobe SiteCatalyst to help customers analyze their events and qualify leads.
I’m terrible at keeping secrets. The toughest secrets to keep are often the new features that engineering is working on for future versions of Adobe Connect. Some of these features are incredibly exciting my first instinct is to want to tell everyone about them.
Usually, I’m not able to do that. I’m very glad to say that – beginning with this blog post – I’m going to start showing some ‘sneak peeks’ at some of the features that you might see in a future version of Adobe Connect.
In this first video post, I’m going to highlight some of the new features around editing recordings. I’ve always felt we had the best recordings in the business because they retained their interactivity. Instead of just showing a video of the meeting, Adobe Connect would replay the full experience using live controls. This enabled customers to search an index for a specific slide or section, to scroll up and down the chat or Q&A pod, and even to participate in a quiz or other interactive element of the meeting.
In the video below, I’ll look at how this interactivity might further benefit our customers by adding even more functionality to the recording index and giving customers the ability to edit more than just the timeline.
There are two two separate pods in Adobe Connect that enable participants to ask questions during a meeting, virtual classroom or webinar.
The Chat pod allows for completely open discussion among all participants and private discussion between two participants or a participant and a group (like the presenters). The Chat pod is unmoderated, which means anyone can post a question or comment and it will be seen immediately by everyone. Private chat appears in a separate tab in the chat pod.
The Q&A pod is similar in that anyone can post a question or comment to the pod, but unlike the chat pod, those posts are only seen by the presenters and hosts in a meeting. A presenter or host can choose to answer a question in the Q&A pod either publicly (in which case everyone will see the question and the answer) or privately (in which case only the questioner will see the question and answer). Questions from the Q&A pod can be assigned to a specific presenter.
So which pod should you use? Should you moderate your discussion or not? The answer of course depends on your web conference. As the host of a meeting, I usually ask myself a few questions when making this decision.
Is the goal to enable participants to ask me questions – or am I looking to facilitate a conversation between participants?
How do I feel about participants chatting privately? Will this be a distraction to the meeting or will it increase engagement?
Are there questions I might not be comfortable answering in public?
How many participants are attending? What kind of meeting is it?
In general, I prefer to use an open, un-moderated chat pod. I find it can increase interaction among all participants. The un-moderated chat pod is ideal for collaborative meetings and often works well for virtual classrooms.
I believe it’s important not only use meeting size as the only factor – but as a meeting grows, it makes sense to swap out the un-moderated chat pod for a moderated Q&A pod. At this point, it also helps to have someone else in the meeting helping to moderate the Q&A pod while you speak. The Q&A pod is ideal for webinars.
Of course, you can have the best of both worlds. I’ll often use an open chat pod in my webinar lobby that participants can use while they’re waiting for a webinar to begin, then switch to a moderated Q&A pod during the webinar itself.
Tips & Tricks
Encourage users to change the color of their text when using the chat pod. It helps to differentiate the questions and makes everything more readable.
The presenter view of the Q&A pod can be sent to the Presenter Only Area (POA). This enables the presenters to work with a much larger pod while they are facilitating the questions.
You can add multiple chat pods to a single layout. This is helpful when you want to solicit feedback across a number of different topics. Simply double-click the title of a chat pod to rename it.
You can export a Q&A log of all of the questions that were asked as a rich text file. You can also email the content of any Q&A or chat pod. Click the pod options menu to access these options.
You can use an un-moderated chat pod and still disable private chat. This can be quickly disabled in the Preferences dialog.
