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05.06.08 Adobe Connect Pro New Features  By Ken Molay Adobe just announced a new release of Acrobat Connect Professional that is supposed to be available by the end of the month. I got a briefing and demo of the software, but I have not had a chance to play with it firsthand yet. Connect Pro 7 takes care of two drawbacks that have inconvenienced me for some time. Meeting participants can now provide feedback to the presenter without seeing the names of other participants in the meeting room. Previous versions coupled the feedback feature to the Attendees pod, so that you had to use up valuable screen real estate and potentially raise privacy concerns if you wanted to collect audience feedback such as "Speed Up" or "Speak Louder." It also gave away the fact that you might not have many attendees in the audience at times when you would rather keep that a secret. The feedback feature has a fixed set of responses that are not customizable. These include standard things such as "Agree" and "Disagree", but they also threw in some choices that seem a little too cute for typical business use, such as "Laughter" and "Applause." If I'm running an investor relations call, I don't think I want financial analysts to see a little smiley face and the word "Laughter" in their console. The other major enhancement is the ability to download meeting recordings to your hard disk in Flash FLV format. These can be hosted on your own website or distributed on CD. Previous versions of the software required all recordings to be hosted on the Adobe servers and they could not be downloaded for distribution. Adobe also embedded a very basic recording editor that allows you to cut out sections of your recording. You might want to get rid of the technical introduction and overview you gave your live audience, or instructions and pauses while waiting for them to complete polls or quizzes. The granularity is to the nearest complete second and the editor is certainly not as sophisticated as third-party dedicated software for audio/video editing, but it's free and will suffice for many basic excisions.
Behind the scenes, Adobe made a huge advance in customization and configuration options for administrators. You can now choose what meeting features and functions are available for use by meeting hosts throughout your organization, and you can also set certain options to be automatically enabled or disabled for all meetings. So you might set all meetings to be automatically recorded, or you might disable the ability for any meeting host to share files or active links to websites. This is part of a general emphasis on compliance for organizations that have to adhere to governmental or industry regulations. You can even set your own Accept/Decline disclaimer for all meeting attendees before they are allowed to join a conference. Administrators can also create limited administration roles for subordinates to take over some of the functions necessary to creating or managing meetings. All that is good for general web conferencing use, especially in large enterprise deployments (Adobe's clear target audience for this product). But the bigger takeaway impression for me was the obvious concentration Adobe is making on the use of Connect Pro for training and eLearning applications. The title card in the PowerPoint briefing I saw said "Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro: High-Impact Rapid eLearning & Virtual Classrooms." Adobe found that the bulk of their customer use was for training functions, and they spent a lot of time enhancing this aspect of the product. Meeting organizers can now prepare any number of breakout rooms and either assign attendees to the sub-rooms manually or have the product distribute them evenly. Attendees get presenter rights in the breakout rooms so they can collaborate on whiteboards, file sharing, and the like. If you are working with a preferred Adobe partner for audio conferencing (such as MeetingOne), the product will automatically subdivide the audio conference into the same breakout groups as the web. Continue reading this article. About the Author: With a background in software development and marketing, Ken has been producing and delivering business webinars since 1999. His background in public speaking, radio, stage acting, and training has given him a unique perspective on what it takes to create a compelling and effective presentation. Currently Ken offers consulting services through his company Webinar Success (www.wsuccess.com). |
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