On November 4, 2009, Adobe announced the latest upgrade to its Web conferencing technology, Acrobat Connect Pro. New features in version 7.5 include Universal Voice (stream your audio through Acrobat Connect Pro), PDF support, secure desktop sharing, and support for up to 80,000 participants in Webcasts. In this review, I’ll give you a quick snapshot of the changes.
A fast overview of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro
Acrobat Connect Pro (ACP) is a Web conferencing application that makes it possible for organizations to conduct online meetings, virtual training sessions, eSeminars and Webinars. These online events can increase staff productivity and greatly reduce travel time, travel expenses, and environmental impact.
Acrobat Connect Pro supports sharing a wide range of rich content, including PowerPoint presentations, printable documents (PDF), live video with Webcams and digital video cameras, and recorded video clips within the meeting. As with other products, you can also leverage the standard Web conferencing features such as live desktop screen sharing, application sharing, audio (Voice Over IP), and multi-user text chat. ACP also supports user-customizable interfaces and layouts.
If you are new to ACP, please read my earlier reviews of this product in Learning Solutions. These cover the basic features in considerable detail, including the evolution of the product over the last two years. Here are the articles:
“Product Review: Adobe Acrobat Professional” (December 3, 2007)
“First Look: Adobe Upgrades Acrobat Connect Pro to Version 7” (May 5, 2008)
New features
Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro’s new features respond to several challenges: increasing concern over controlling the cost of online events, improving collaboration and user experience in these events, satisfying requirements for compliance with various regulations and for security, and delivering online events to very large groups.
Universal Voice allows you to stream the audio for your online event through Acrobat Connect Pro, creating a highly cost-effective Web conferencing solution. With 30 participants for a one-hour meeting, the average phone cost is .06 per minute/per person. This is equates to $3.60 per person for the hour. With 30 people on your teleconference, you will spend $108.00 in teleconference each hour. By broadcasting your audio through Voice over IP (VoIP), you will spend nothing on audio.
If you, the host, prefer to use your telephone instead of a headset or microphone, your teleconference will only use one line and will broadcast the audio from that telephone line to the participants, saving you $104.40 per hour, with the above example. This new feature also allows you to set up the technology from your meeting room (see Figure 1) and reduce costs by using one line instead of 30 lines. Set-up for telephone providers is easy from the ACP server (see Figure 2). Enter the call-in details and you now have integrated audio with your Meeting Room. You can record the meeting with audio.
Figure 1 You can set up your teleconference provider into your meeting room to broadcast the call through ACP and control the features from your meeting room.
Figure 2 Set-Up for telephone providers is easy from the ACP server. Enter the call-in details to integrate audio with your Meeting Room.
PDF support is now available in Connect Meetings. You can upload any Portable Document Format (PDF) document to the meeting room and share it with your audience. (See Figure 3.) This makes effective use of bandwidth. Instead of screen-sharing printable documents, you can upload them and collaborate in real time. This also allows you to work with minimal latency and provides a better user experience.
Figure 3 The PDF menu bar makes it much easier to provide printable documents to participants, and to work on them collaboratively.
Secure desktop sharing is a key benefit where compliance or security is a concern. The ability to share applications and your Desktop in an online meeting is important in many training sessions, but it can also have risks if proprietary information is inadvertently broadcast to participants. For example, if a hospital accidentally shares an application and as a result exposes private medical information, this will violate doctor-patient confidentiality and privacy laws. Acrobat Connect Pro now gives you control over which applications can be screen-shared and enables you to “white-list” applications, meaning they will never be broadcast accidently by any meeting host. This feature allows all users to collaborate with ease while also adhering to security policies and complying with all company-wide regulations.
ACP also includes compliance features that enable administrators to save chat transcripts, and display notices and disclaimers to all meeting participants to maintain corporate compliancy. There is another feature called “Compliance Control” that gives Administrators the ability to turn off any feature of the system to comply with any global governance policies and procedures. For example, if video broadcasting is not permitted in your organization, you can turn off that feature globally and the meeting host will never have the ability to broadcast a Webcam from their meeting room.
Deliver Web seminars to larger audiences. Organizations can now broaden their reach by using Acrobat Connect Pro to conduct large scale webcasts that can reach up to 80,000 people in a single event. These Webcasts can include richer media demos such as video and high-end Flash simulations. All registration and attendance is tracked and saved permanently for detailed management and reporting.
A new implementation model has also been added. Adobe Acrobat Pro is now available as a managed service. This means that organizations will be able to outsource IT support for their online events, while maintaining security and control.
Conclusion
In this new release, Adobe Acrobat Connect Plus users benefit from Adobe’s constant efforts to keep things simple. As I continue to leverage these new features in my own practices, I realize just how powerful virtual training has become. There really isn’t anything from a classroom environment you can’t do with this product. Each activity that I do in my face-to-face training sessions can be re-created in this virtual environment giving learners extremely rich user experiences. Hats off to Adobe for these upgrades!
