Adobe Connect Blog

by Guillaume Privat, Director Adobe Connect

A recent report published by Forrester Research recognised Adobe CQ as a leader in web experience management. “The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management For Digital Customer Experience, Q2 2013” report looked at 10 web content management (WCM) products, one of which was Adobe CQ, across 100 comprehensive criteria such as vendor’s current offering, strategy and marketing presence.

Adobe CQ is the underlying technology used in Adobe Connect 9 Events module used to create rich events catalog, micro-sites or landing page.  It provides an easy drag and drop framework that enables any webinar producers to create and update rich and professional looking information and registration pages without the need to work with IT or external agencies.  It speeds up the process of the creation of these pages and reduces to cost to create great looking landing pages that will help build a large audience for a webinar.

In addition to CQ, Connect 9 Events provide also out of the box analytics powered by Adobe Analytics (previously known as SiteCatalyst), which help marketers analyze and optimize every step of their webinar: optimize the registration form, optimize email communications, optimize webinar promotional spend, optimize webinar content delivery.

For the price of the Adobe Connect Events module, webinar producers can access 3 leading technologies seamlessly integrated into an out of the box complete solution for webinars: Adobe CQ to create rich landing pages, Adobe Connect to run rich and engaging webinars and Adobe Analytics to measure and optimize the entire webinar experience.

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.

Adobe Connect has a huge number of features dedicated to helping hosts and presenters engage with their attendees. The use of polls can help capture information and guide the flow of a webinar. Chat and Q&A provide a tremendous amount of interactivity that helps differentiate a live session from an on-demand recording. Custom pods can do just about anything – including entertain and engage.

In this sneak peek, I look at a new pod under development that can help a presenter or host understand the level of engagement in their webinar or virtual classroom. Providing realtime feedback can help hosts optimize the experience for every participant.

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.

Stay tuned for more sneak peeks.

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.

As we kick off an exciting new year, we are pleased to announce the limited public beta for the next version of Adobe Connect for Webinars solution (codename Maple). We have been working on the release for months with the focus on helping our customers deliver compelling, immersive webinars, maximize event attendance, and measure results to optimize workflows – and ultimately improve the ROI of campaigns and events.

We will be accepting 100 beta participants on a first come first serve basis. If you are interested in joining the beta, please fill out the beta interest form.

From the Maple beta you will also be able to try out the beta version of Adobe Connect Mobile for Android. This beta version significantly expands the amount of controls and rich capabilities available for Adobe Connect users on mobile phones and tablets.  Note that we currently have leading mobile applications for Android, iOS, and Blackberry Playbook now available as well – you can check them out here.

This is certainly an exciting time for Adobe Connect and we are thrilled to share with you the latest beta versions of our solutions for your feedback. Stay tuned for more news from us and don’t forget to follow us on @AdobeConnect for the latest updates.

We wish you all a terrific 2012.

-Paresh Kharya (@pareshkharya), Senior Product Manager, Adobe Connect

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

It’s not hard to understand why more organizations are looking to eLearning to help reduce the costs and lost productivity associated with travel for sales training. What comes as a surprise to many though is how expensive and time consuming it can be to create great eLearning content. It typically requires the involvement of subject matter experts, developers, artists, training managers, IT and more.

In the video below, I show a different approach. Rapid sales training combines the ability to very quickly create on-demand content with live virtual classrooms that provide a collaborative and engaging environment for students.

There are a number of different reasons we’re seeing more marketing organizations choose webinars for their lead generation activities.  Certainly cost is one of the biggest factors when compared to in-person events, but customers also tell us that they are able to reach a larger, more geographically diverse audience with an online event.  It also makes it easier to secure speakers when activities like travel aren’t necessary.

Moving an event online though makes it more difficult for a speaker to really engage with his or her audience.  You lose the two-way eye contact and you can’t read the body language of the participants.  For these reasons, it becomes absolutely critical to leverage rich media and provide interaction during the event to ensure everyone stays connected and engaged.

In the video below, I walk through some of product features that make Adobe Connect the best technology platform for delivering marketing webinars and measuring your success.

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