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Did you know? ConnectSolutions now has locations in North America & EMEA
March 19th, 2008
We’re working on a new AIR-based application for Acrobat Connect Professional, and looking for some folks who would be willing to help test and provide feedback on it in the coming weeks. In particular, we are looking for:
- Passionate Acrobat Connect Professional users
- Users or deployments with a lot of content on the system (either through Adobe Presenter publishing or uploads to Meetings)
- People willing to spend an hour or so over the next month to test this out and provide feedback
So, if you meet any or all of the characteristics above, please drop us a line at beta at connectsolutions dot com so we can follow-up with you. Beta participants will not only have the chance to directly impact the direction of this application, but also be entitled to participate in future application-betas as they become available.
Michael Fitzpatrick |
Acrobat Connect Pro, ConnectSolutions |
February 25th, 2008
Adobe released AIR 1.0 today, which is exciting news based on the opportunities with MeetingPulse and some additional applications we have in mind.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, many of the APIs we relied on in the early Beta releases ended up changing from release-to-release, so MeetingPulse does not currently work in AIR 1.0. We’ll be updating MeetingPulse in the next few weeks, but before we go and crank open the code, we’d love to hear from you all on what features you’d like to see. Feel free to drop me a line: michael at connectsolutions dot com.
Michael Fitzpatrick |
ConnectSolutions, MeetingPulse |
February 12th, 2008
Acrobat Connect Pro has been identified as a finalist in the “Best Collaboration Solution” category, which is nice to see (and of course, we agree):
Finalists - The 23rd Annual SIIA Codie Award
Unfortunately, we have to wait until May to see which solution goes home the winner.
Michael Fitzpatrick |
Acrobat Connect Pro, web conferencing |
January 28th, 2008
While I don’t anticipate many large enterprise organizations making the XO One-Laptop-Per-Child their corporate laptop standard, it is nice to see Acrobat Connect Professional continued to be successfully used across a variety of platforms:
(photo courtesy of “Laddieo“)
For another atypical device to run web conferencing meetings on, see this post about Acrobat Connect Professional on the Wii
Michael Fitzpatrick |
Acrobat Connect Pro, web conferencing |
January 24th, 2008
MeetingPulse Support for Adobe AIR Beta 3
We’ve received a few questions about MeetingPulse support for Adobe AIR Beta 3. As is expected with beta technology, Adobe’s AIR platform went through some pretty significant changes from Beta 2 (which MeetingPulse was last updated for), and Beta 3. Unfortunately, several of the AIR APIs that were used in MeetingPulse were changed from Beta 2 to Beta 3, so this migration will require more than a simple recompile. We do not have an immediate date set for this update, so please consider the following:
- According to Adobe AIR Beta 3 Release Notes ( http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Release_Notes ), you can run Beta 2 and Beta 3 on the same computer
- Based on this, we suggest maintaining your Beta 2 install, along with the latest Beta 3 until we’ve had a chance to update MeetingPulse.
Michael Fitzpatrick |
Acrobat Connect Pro, MeetingPulse |
January 18th, 2008
Out of the many frustrations we hear from web conferencing users deployed on alternatives to Acrobat Connect Professional, starting a web conferencing meeting up tends to be one of the highest on the list. The issues vary from user to user, though software installation requirements from companies such as Webex tend to be the most common. It’s been awhile since I’ve participated in web conferencing experiences outside of Acrobat Connect Professional, so I decided to perform a quick user-experience comparison between Connect and Webex. My results supported what we’ve been hearing from customers:
The good news is that both solutions were able to launch users into the full meeting experience in under a minute. However, in the several tests I ran, Webex took roughly four times the amount of time to fully load and enable user interaction relative to Acrobat Connect Professional. Yes, we’re talking seconds, but think about the following:
Let’s assume I host 10 meetings a month. My average meeting size is about 5 participants, so that’s 50 meeting starts per month, or 600 annually. Taking the 600 sessions, and adding an extra 30 seconds of “loading” time, we’ve lost five hours of productivity. Finally, take that five hours and multiply it by the number of meeting organizers in your organization. The “instant-on” experience of Acrobat Connect Professional does add up to very real productivity gains over competing solutions.
I would love to hear what you have to say about your experiences out there with these two solutions, as well as other web conferencing solutions.
Michael Fitzpatrick |
Acrobat Connect Pro, web conferencing |
January 16th, 2008
We are in the process of looking to find several talented people to join the team and deliver our focus on customer success with Acrobat Connect Professional and related technology. This is a chance for individuals to gain exposure to happy customers, cutting-edge technology, and global infrastructure. To learn more, or recommend someone for the available positions, please read on… Job Postings
And if the following sounds like you, we want to talk to you immediately:
… a Windows and Linux hacker, MySQL and SQLServer expert, performance and networking specialist, and excellent scripter
… someone looking for challenging, cool problems to solve, in an engineering-driven environment
… someone who likes taking things apart in your off hours to see how they work, just as much as you like putting them back together when you’re done
… someone who gets great satisfaction from making customers happy, by building systems that are faster, more reliable, more maintainable, and more available
Michael Fitzpatrick |
Acrobat Connect Pro, ConnectSolutions, General, web conferencing |
January 7th, 2008
Happy New Year to all Acrobat Connect fans around the world. We decided to start 2008 off in a big way, so we are pleased to announce the immediate availability of our EMEA-based data-center for Acrobat Connect Professional!
This location sports all the same high performance, high-reliability features of our North America locations, bringing great experiences to Acrobat Connect users throughout EMEA. When combined with our locations throughout North America, ConnectSolutions now extends its high-performance service infrastructure for organizations requiring global reach.
Benefits of this new service platform include:
- Instant On Deployment Capability: Organizations can be up and running with their Acrobat Connect Professional investment in hours, not weeks. This drives an immediate return-on-investment.
- High Performance Service Infrastructure: Latency is a real-time communication experience killer, and when relying on resources across continents and oceans, you’ll come to expect it. By deploying your Acrobat Connect Professional investment in close proximity to your end-users, you ensure low latency and a rich, engaging experience.
- Maximum Flexibility: You retain the ability to deploy and configure Acrobat Connect Professional to the exact requirements of your business with QuickConnect. Each customer is deployed with their own dedicated server resources, ensuring the most reliable, scalable, and extensible deployment available for Acrobat Connect Professional.
Whether your organization requires team collaboration, virtual classrooms, or large events, QuickConnect in EMEA provides a leading platform to deliver great experiences to your end-users. We’re excited about this breakthrough for Acrobat Connect Professional customers, and look forward to working with you!
Michael Fitzpatrick |
Acrobat Connect Pro, ConnectSolutions, unified communication, web conferencing |
November 13th, 2007
Acrobat Connect Professional, since its days as Macromedia Breeze, has always included video-support. In fact, the application, by default, includes video capabilities in the default web conferencing layout. This video capability provides a rich, engaging meeting environment (often making up for potentially dull slides 
The latest release of Service Pack 3 for Adobe’s Acrobat Connect Professional had a few significant changes, including support for the On2 codec found in Flash Player 8 and 9. This support was extended to the Presenter Add-In, and this opens up the Connect-platform to support a number of video opportunities moving forward. We have been working on a prototype recently that leverages several Adobe technologies, and the results have been exciting.
The Prototype: Real-time streaming of high-quality video through Acrobat Connect Professional
The application was surprisingly simple to put together. We used Adobe Flash to build an application that connects to a Flash Media Server (I happen to have one at my personal hosting site, MediaTemple), although it could just as easily connect to the Flash Video Streaming Service. This Flash application subscribes to a stream on the FMS server, and then broadcasts it out to each participate via the share-pod (where I had uploaded the Flash application). On another computer, I used the Flash Media Encoder 2 application to capture a camera in real-time, and stream it to the FMS server mentioned above. The encoder allows you to use a variety of settings for your video stream, and uses the On2 encoder.
The results were fantastic! There are a tremendous number of use-cases that could be supported with this basic set-up (seminars or events, previously recorded training sessions, etc…), so we’ll continue to experiment here.
Michael Fitzpatrick |
Acrobat Connect Pro, ConnectSolutions, web conferencing |
November 7th, 2007
Continuing on the whitepaper series we developed with Adobe for Acrobat Connect Professional, the following document covers multiple options available to customers for integrating audio with their web conferencing experiences. The options include audio conferencing bridge integration, VoIP, and a hybrid of VoIP and audio conferencing, and as you’ll see, each of these options has its strengths and weaknesses depending on the use-case.
You can download the whitepaper here: Audio Integration Options with Acrobat Connect Professional
Michael Fitzpatrick |
Acrobat Connect Pro, ConnectSolutions, web conferencing |