What’s new with Connect Pro Central (formerly known as the Web Manager)
The home page is much easier to navigate (Figure 7). Now you can create meetings or virtual classrooms, upload content, and create training courses and curriculum right from the home page. New options from the home page are tabs, with a calendar, training, training catalog, meetings, and resources.
The area of Connect Pro Central that exceeds my expectations is the new Admin section for compliance and the reporting features.
The new reporting area organizes access to metrics by functional area. For example, IT groups can assess the system usage – either by individual, by group, or even across the entire server. Unlike other static HTML reports, the new Flex-based reporting dashboard instantly gives you up-to-the-minute reports on all the key server-performance statistics. The system instantly creates charts and graphs that are very easy to read, print, and download.
IT (Information Technology) groups are often responsible for ensuring that a company adheres to internal policies or externally imposed government regulations. To support organizations in their efforts to meet compliance and regulatory guidelines, Adobe added an entirely new set of compliance options to the Administration section. These options make it possible for an organization to selectively enable or disable features on their account – for example, enforcing recordings and chat transcripts to comply with government-regulated communication auditing in Financial Services or Pharmaceuticals. Another example would be disabling video or desktop sharing, to reduce bandwidth load. This allows customizing the system to accommodate any type of environment and bandwidth limitations.
An organization can enable or disable all of the following features over the entire system:
- Desktop, windows, and application sharing
- The Whiteboard
- "Pause and Annotate" screen
- Chat and Private Chat, Instant Message
- Q&A
- Webcam Video
- VoIP
- Web links
- Polling
- Invitee List
- Request for control
- File Share
- Breakout rooms
- Auto-promote participants
- Open course enrollment
- Record all meetings, disable recording for all
- Purge chat at end of session, purge notes at end of session
- Only allow sharing of documents from the Content Course library
- Only allow upload of documents from selected groups
- Chat transcript
- Compliance message notification
What’s new in Presenter 7?
Adobe Presenter is available for purchase as a stand-alone authoring tool, or bundled with the Acrobat Connect Pro system. This product is an add-on to PowerPoint to increase the capabilities of your existing training content by adding rich media and interactions. Once installed, you will see a new drop-down window in PowerPoint (Figure 8).
Because this product utilizes Flash, you can provide instant access to your content by publishing to the Connect server, and providing a URL to your course. No special download is required to play any content you created with Presenter. The publishing process converts the sound files you record, or import, and merges them with your PowerPoint slides. It creates an interactive user interface around the slides so users can engage with your content quickly and easily, either sequentially or in a non-linear order. See Figure 9.
The sidebar at the right of Figure 9 is an interactive menu. Each slide appears in this scrolling window. You can select slides out of sequence, or opt to go through the training at the pace the author set up when producing the content. The author can also turn off this sidebar so that sequential navigation is the only option. The control bar at the bottom allows the user to pause the audio track and provides the information on that slide, including which slide you are on, how many slides are in the deck, and how much audio remains on that slide. Presenter sets up all these user interface features for you automatically when you click the publish button. The color of the user interface matches the bottom of the slide perfectly. A theme editor comes with Presenter that allows you to select an exact RGB color to match your corporate branding. This feature means that design teams can create custom “skins” for any organization, so the content looks custom and not generic.
Video capture is no longer just for Connect Meeting
Video Capture and Import is another new feature for Presenter, which now includes a capture device for recording directly to Flash video. This means you no longer need video editing software (for example, Adobe Premiere, Apple's Final Cut Pro, or Sorenson Video) to convert video for use in Presenter. You can launch the Video Capture software, and use your Webcam to record video with any subject-matter expert. See Figure 10.
Normally, when a knowledge worker wants to use video, he or she needs to install special capture software, and learn a whole new workflow. With Presenter, the user simply hits the record button and talks. The user decides where to save the video, and adjusts the quality level, after which Presenter converts it into Flash video. You can also import video into Presenter, using the Presenter drop-down menu.
Publish your e-Learning content as PDF
Another new option with Presenter is the ability to publish your e-Learning presentation as a PDF, so that learners can play it back by using Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 (see Figure 11). This solution provides users with a single file for download and local playback within any environment that is standardized with PDF.
The net result of these changes is that you now can leverage the popular and nearly universal Flash and PDF formats to deliver content to your internal learners, or to external customers. These publishing options are in addition to local publishing (offline) to hard drive or CD, and server publishing (online). When you publish locally to a hard drive, you can have Presenter automatically build the “Autorun files” for CD distribution, by checking a box. After you copy the files to a CD, the course will run automatically when the user loads the CD. Using these options, users will be able to view your course online or offline without requiring special software.
Randomized or pooled quizzes
It's easy to incorporate surveys and quizzes directly into your course. Presenter offers a wide range of question types, including multiple choice, multiple answer, true/false, short answer, matching, and Likert-type rating scales (for surveys and evaluation). You can use question branching, and provide audio and visual feedback for correct and incorrect answers.
The Quiz Manager in Presenter now has more options for training designers. In addition to the options just mentioned, you can now randomize question order, randomize answer order, and randomize the selection of questions from a pool. With Quiz Manager, you can create many questions, and have the software pick 10 questions, for example, for your test at random. (See Figure 12.) As a result, each learner will see a unique test every time he or she takes your course. This is a great option for compliance and regulatory training. Select these options from a checkbox in the Quiz Manager. This does not require programming, and the new features are in a familiar authoring environment – the Quiz Setting tab.
Incorporate existing content into Presenter or Connect Meeting
Turn passive viewers into active participants! Insert interactive Captivate simulations, software demonstrations, or scenario-based learning into your e-Learning by using the “Insert Flash (swf)” item on the Presenter menu. If a third-party authoring product has the capability to publish to Flash, you can seamlessly integrate any of its assets, or learning objects, into Presenter or Meeting. You can also leverage this content in Presenter by reusing the same asset in Meeting for a live session. This consistency across learning environments allows organizations to author once and use many times over for an increased ROI.
Summary
Adobe has tackled the challenges faced with compliance and regulatory training in this new release of Acrobat Connect Pro. They have created a customizable turn key system that can accommodate the global challenges of large organizations, while keeping the learning curve minimal so non-technical training teams can use all the options of this system quickly. This solution provides all the tools necessary to support a global blended training model, and the ability to craft reusable learning objects for maximum ROI.
The features added to Version 7 of Acrobat Connect Pro address the limitations of the earlier versions. I see the compliance features as a big plus for e-Learning in the Financial and Life Science sectors. Providing Information Technology teams with the ability to customize the system to meet their standards, is another big plus. I was extremely impressed with the breakout rooms, and the way that they provide a completely integrated experience; managing users, telephony, and content within the same environment.
