Nothing lasts forever, it seems. It's only been six months since my last article on this subject, but it's already time to update my comments on Adobe's Web conferencing and training solution.
Adobe is announcing the release of Version 7 of Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional this week, and there are a number of important changes and improvements to the product. Some of these address shortcomings that I pointed out in December, and others go well beyond my wish list.
As I noted in my December 3, 2007 product review in Learning Solutions (see “In the Archives” at the end of this article), Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional is an enterprise tool for Web conferencing and for blended learning. I'm going to do my best to avoid needlessly repeating much of the basic information that appeared in my earlier article, so if you are not familiar with this application, you may want to go to the Learning Solutions Archive online and download it. For the most part, this review of Version 7 concentrates on the improvements that Adobe has made over Version 6.
A quick overview
In this article, I begin with a very fast summary of what Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro does, and the components of the solution that the new version affects most. Most of the article will address three areas of improvement: Improvements to the virtual classroom, improvements to compliance options, and improvements to the Presenter component. I will conclude with my observations about incorporating existing content into Presenter, or into the virtual classroom.
What's new in Version 7?
Acrobat Connect Pro (to keep the name short) combines four critical components for e-Learning, whether rapid or blended: Easy content authoring, convenient content management, live virtual classrooms, and curriculum management and tracking. It supports these functions with a fully integrated back-end system that provides detailed reports on system usage and completion status. The easy-to-use interface works well for both technical and non-technical users.
The system consists of three major components: An authoring tool, a Web conferencing application, and a server that hosts meeting rooms and handles reporting. The authoring tool, called Presenter, is an add-on to PowerPoint that supports both self-paced (asynchronous) learning and live, synchronous communication content. Because it works from within PowerPoint, the learning curve is minimal. This release includes improvements to a number of existing Presenter features, including those for creating quiz interactions, recording audio, importing audio, editing audio, inserting Flash content, and publishing to Flash.
The live Web conferencing solution (Acrobat Connect Meeting) has several new features. These include break out rooms, flexible archive editing and offline playback capabilities for recorded sessions, and new compliance and regulatory options for security that allow organizations to customize the system to meet their needs. These features are ones that users have been requesting for some time.
The server that hosts all the meeting rooms and content (Acrobat Connect Enterprise Server) is now Flex-based. It has extensive options for reporting, and a streamlined navigation system to quickly enable access to and downloading of reporting information. Flex is Adobe's cross-platform technology that supports consistent deployment of RIA (Rich Internet Applications) across major browsers, desktops, and operating systems.
Although you can purchase the content authoring tool, Presenter, separately from the live virtual classroom tool, Meeting, the products can exploit their integrated design and provide the greatest value when you use them as a complete blended enterprise solution. All components of this system use the Adobe Flash Player for deployment. Since 98% of all computers in the world already have the Flash Player installed, each published component of this system can work seamlessly together, can be used as a stand-alone learning object, and can support re-use in blended models.
What are the benefits from the Version 7 changes?
What does that mean for the organization that purchases this turn key system (or a piece of this system)? It means cost savings, and the ability to generate ROI much faster. The learning curve for Acrobat Connect Pro is short (a day or two per tool), and Adobe provides certified training with manuals, multimedia assets, and samples to help get your team up to speed quickly. As a result, organizations can get the system into their enterprise quickly, and have training teams be proficient with the product in a few days or weeks (depending on the size of the organization).
Finally, administrators can now tailor the system to meet any organization's internal compliance standards by enabling and disabling any feature of the system. I will highlight and talk about the details of these new features. I will also take you through the new features of Connect Pro, and shed light on how these features can help you fill organizational gaps.
Improvements to the Virtual Classroom
Let's start with the live virtual classroom component, Acrobat Connect Meeting. Meeting supports your ability to customize the user interface to fit your needs, through scalable pods (windows) and custom layouts. The virtual meeting space provides facilities for screen sharing, file sharing, polling, multiple presenters, chatting, Q&A filtering, white-boarding, and a host of other really nice features, for a rich and engaging online experience. All these features were available in Version 6, in the same locations, so existing users will be able to adapt to the new options quickly and easily.
Collaboration, communication, and control options
The virtual training room has new and improved options for participant control. Meeting makes it easier for participants to collaborate with presenters, through colored emoticons and Voice over IP (VoIP). To increase the friendliness of collaboration online, these options are always visible and interactive. The Camera and Voice Pod is now always visible at the bottom of the Meeting Room to everyone, so each participant can easily control these features for themselves from any layout. (See Figure 1.) The VoIP feature (the button marked “Talk” in Figure 1) is not taking up real estate in the Meeting Room display area (in the form of a pod), so it is possible to maximize active content for better viewing by participants.
Once selected by participants, emoticons appear in the Attendee List Pod (see Figure 2) so Presenters can easily get feedback from the participants on their delivery, on questions they may ask, or about technical issues they may be experiencing in the field.
Screen sharing push
Another streamlined feature easily allows a participant to share a screen with the audience. The host can do this directly from the Attendee List pod by selecting the participant's name. The host can activate and deactivate the VoIP or Screen Sharing very easily right from the pod, by clicking the “Revoke Screen Share Rights” button. (See Figure 3.) This button is a toggle to turn the feature off and on. Once activated, an icon appears next to the participant's name so the host is aware of which attendees have enhanced rights for online collaboration.
Breakout Rooms
When collaborating with large groups, it is common practice to have breakout groups for planning, brainstorming, and project team collaboration. In the early version of Connect, you had to load a Flash component in order for this feature to work. With Connect Professional 7, you can assign breakout groups, and provide the groups with several very useful features. You can easily assign specific individuals to a particular Breakout Room, or just let the system evenly distribute them across several breakout rooms (see Figure 4). When you initiate the breakout sessions, users move into their own Breakout layout. They receive rights to share their voice and the whiteboard, or upload content. Each breakout room in Acrobat Connect Pro includes its own private VoIP option for each participant. All Participants become Presenters, with enhanced rights to speak and share content, when they arrive in a Breakout Room.
The effect of the breakout facility in Meeting is that you can have separate (private) meetings in the same meeting room. The host can receive messages sent from any of the breakout rooms, and can jump right into any room with the participants. Hosts can also send messages to every room simultaneously (Figure 5). Hosts still have complete control over the Breakout Rooms from the main meeting room.
Once the groups complete their breakout tasks, the Host can bring everyone back into the main meeting room and share the content from the breakout rooms. Note that this approach supports a completely integrated experience; managing users, telephony, and content all takes place within the same environment. Participants never left the virtual meeting room, so any content they uploaded, created with the whiteboard, or typed into a chat pod or note pod is available to the group, and for archiving for future sessions.
Recording/Editing feature
One of the limitations with Connect v6 was the inability to edit archived recordings, and download them to a local system for use offline. With Connect Pro 7, you can now download your archived meetings and edit them. If you want a local version for your desktop, choose the “offline” option, and save the video locally as a stand-alone application – you can view archived meetings without needing any connectivity to the Internet. Users can also crop out selected demos, and use pieces of the live meeting with other programs. Because it is a Flash video file, you can convert a recorded meeting to play back on other devices such as iPods and PDAs, supporting the concept of Reusable Learning Objects, RLOs. (See my article from August 6, 2007 on Reusable Learning Objects, listed in “In the Archives”).
Adobe makes editing easy by supporting mark-in and mark-out editing points. Once you select a section of the archive, you can delete that section. This means you can remove unwanted chatting, or introductions that refer to time and date. (See Figure 6.) You can also change viewing permission on any recording, and protect recordings from deletion by non-administrative users.
Integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and Microsoft Live Communication Server (LCS)
When hosting a “live” virtual meeting or training session, you can view a list of the people invited, see their presence on OCS or LCS, and initiate chat conversations with instant messaging (IM) right from the virtual meeting room. For organizations using IM, this is a great feature to get colleagues into a meeting instantly.
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.
