Adobe Connect Blog

We’re pleased to report that on Dec. 5, Gartner, Inc. positioned Adobe in the Leaders Quadrant of its 2011 “Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing” research report. Adobe was one of 12 Web conferencing vendors evaluated.

Of the companies positioned in the Leaders Quadrant, David Mario Smith (@DaveMario) of Gartner wrote:

“Vendors in the Leaders quadrant have achieved significant market share, while demonstrating an ability to respond to customers’ needs. Leaders have robust, scalable products with a wide range of features, a large installed base, acceptable financial performance and good distribution. Leaders are doing well today and are prepared for the future.”

The report is available on our site here and from Gartner here. And we encourage you to learn more about all that Adobe Connect has to offer here.

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

-Guillaume Privat (@gprivat), Director, Adobe Connect

About the Magic Quadrant

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in our research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Thanks for joining our Twitterview with Randah McKinnie yesterday. If you didn’t have a chance to attend or ask a question, please find below a recap of the entire Q & A session. Randah was able to answer a series of questions on recent Adobe Connect Mobile updates and announcements.

If you have any additional questions or are interested in our next event, keep following this blog or find us on Twitter @AdobeConnect.

To help tell our story, we’ve put the finishing touches on a video that does a nice job of introducing Adobe Connect web conferencing. It highlights benefits and capabilities, and also features a few organizations that are doing great things and realizing success with the solution.
We encourage you to watch Adobe Connect in action and learn how it’s helping organizations conduct more effective eLearning, web meetings, and webinars on devices of all kinds:

Keep an eye on us here and follow @AdobeConnect on Twitter — we’ll continue to share stories, tips, news and discuss a range of web conferencing topics.

Mrs. Fields Famous Brands is known for delicious freshly baked cookies and TCBY frozen yogurt. They partnered with conferencing service provider MeetingOne to adopt Adobe Connect and establish a dynamic web conferencing platform. Now, staff and franchisees worldwide are more connected and via webcams, can engage in “face-to-face” videoconferencing. Web-based meetings are helping to enhance the company’s culture by affirming core values and communicating new developments.

Adobe Connect’s persistent meeting room capabilities make it quick and easy for Mrs. Fields to deliver meetings on the fly, which can be attended from laptops, mobile devices and smartphones. Recording features let stakeholders attend at any time, as convenient. Additionally, the company has expanded its market share by engaging and recruiting new franchisees through quarterly public webinars via Adobe Connect. Cost savings are also impressive — by decreasing travel time and expenses, Mrs. Fields is saving nearly $30,000 annually. To learn more about Mrs. Fields and its use of Adobe Connect, click here.

Stay in touch with us here and follow us on Twitter @AdobeConnect — we’ll continue to share successes, news and discuss a range of web conferencing topics.

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

We’re delighted to announce the worldwide availability of Adobe Connect Managed Services (ACMS)! This is a new single-tenant, hosted offering of our enterprise web conferencing solution managed by our own Adobe Connect experts. It leverages Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service to provide “on the fly” scaling of resources along with enhanced flexibility, customization, and security options.

Many of our customers have expressed strong interest in an Adobe Connect cloud offering that combines the best features of a hosted solution with those of an on premise deployment.

Often, what customers tell us they like most about a hosted offering is that:

• No infrastructure is required
• No IT management is needed
• Deployment is fast
• Service is subscription based

At the same time, customers have told us they find our on-premise option attractive because it offers:

• A single tenant environment
• Control over maintenance and upgrade schedules
• A high degree of customizability
• A broad range of security options
• Deep integration with back-office applications

It’s at the intersection of the best of hosted and on premise deployment options where a cloud solution really shines for many customers. With that in mind, here are some of the key highlights of our new ACMS offering:

• Elastic scaling of cloud resources to meet changing capacity needs
• Rapid time to value of the Adobe Connect solution with the benefits of control, additional security options, and customizability of on premise deployments
• Installation, end-to-end management, and all necessary resources from software to virtual machines to networking
• Available in any of the Amazon cloud regions around the globe
• SAS 70/II certification, ISO27001 compliance and HIPPA agreements available

As part of bringing ACMS to market, we’ve also worked closely with early customers deploying the solution. We have greatly appreciated their feedback—and that of all of our customers—during the development and rollout of ACMS.

So where can you learn more? Check out our Buying Guide and also our Deployment Options Solution Brief explaining the capabilities and differences between the three Adobe Connect deployment options.

We’re interested in your thoughts and questions, as always, so please share in comments or via Twitter @AdobeConnect.

-Mitch Nelson, Director of Managed Services, Adobe

Mike Garcia, construction operations specialist at the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), recently talked to us about how the state agency improves training, certification, and management of construction projects using Adobe Connect. By implementing the solution, UDOT can reach more than 400 workers statewide simultaneously with training content.

Adobe Connect enables UDOT to eliminate hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel expenses. In addition, UDOT can reduce expenses associated with paper-based training materials while boosting productivity and decreasing travel. With Adobe Connect, the agency completes projects that citizens need faster and at lower costs, saving taxpayers millions of dollars annually.

UDOT can now integrate periodic quizzes and tests into its online training to challenge a worker’s understanding and comprehension of rules, regulations, and policies. This allows for better tracking of training completion, compliance, and comprehension. UDOT manages the training content on-premise, which provides a higher level of security than other solutions offered.

To learn more about UDOT and its use of Adobe Connect, read the full story.

Marketing webinars are an important tool to help organizations create a dialog with prospects and customers and conveniently showcase their products and services.

 Successful webinars bring many potential benefits, among them:

• Reach broader, geographically dispersed audiences more conveniently and at greatly reduced expense

• Interact with prospects and customers to more effectively understand their needs

• Develop leads for your sales force to follow up on

• Increase sales

With the above in mind, we’ve created a video that illustrates how Adobe Connect can help deliver what we consider the most powerful webinars on the market today.

The video also highlights how one of our customers, MedPoint Communications, leverages Adobe Connect to support its business. 

Check out the video below. And, as always, we’re interested in your thoughts, so let us know in comments or via Twitter @AdobeConnect.

Brian Garnett, Adobe Connect senior product marketing manager

In a post on our blog earlier this week, we asked what you wish your web conferencing solution could do. Not surprisingly, you had a lot of great (and in some cases quite funny) suggestions, which we appreciate and take to heart. Thanks again to all who participated. We’ve gathered a set of our favorite responses to the contest question in the Storify post further below. Please do check it out.

As we mentioned in that earlier post, respondents who followed @AdobeConnect and included the #AdobeConnect hashtag with their “wish” were entered into a random drawing for a 4-month Adobe Connect subscription. And we’d like to congratulate our winner, @kalarson, whom we’ve reached out to directly on Twitter.

Finally, keep in mind that although no web conferencing solution on the market can currently do everything we heard from you…and in some cases may never – like automatically ordering donuts for attendees …Adobe Connect is the most extensible product on the market. By that we mean developers can create just about any type of custom functionality that integrates into our solution to extend its capabilities. If you weren’t aware of that, we invite you to check out the cool and useful extensions (such as the TwitterConnect pod) from Adobe and our partners on the Adobe Connect Exchange. Extensions are built leveraging our Collaboration Builder SDK.



In today’s global business environment, it is critical for enterprises to quickly and continuously train a broadly dispersed sales force to remain competitive. This is often challenging, especially with the speed at which products are released, markets change, new partnerships evolve, and sales teams expand around the globe.  Leveraging eLearning software for virtual and on-demand training is certainly a necessity in meeting these challenges, but it is important to choose the right eLearning solution as well.  A highly effective eLearning solution needs to provide easy and reliable access, keep learners engaged, and present complex ideas in the most efficient manner possible so that sales teams can quickly glean insights and get back to the field to apply them, without impacting sales schedules. 

With these requirements in mind, we’ve created a video that shows how Adobe Connect enables rapid creation, deployment, and management of sales training courses and content, provides easy access for learners, and keeps learners interested with rich and interactive content.  You will also see how Xerox uses Adobe Connect to deliver rapid training to thousands of employees and customers worldwide.

Check out the video below and, as always, let us know if you have thoughts or questions – either in comments below or via Twitter @AdobeConnect.