Acrobat Connect Professional
is a web conferencing and online
collaboration tool from Adobe.
It keeps improving with every release and remains the real
time conferencing solution to beat.
I thought I’d take another look at the technology to what has
changed since I last reviewed it.
So read on for a comprehensive, independent evaluation of some
of the key features of Connect Professional, along with some
strengths and weaknesses of what was formerly known as Macromedia
Breeze.
Changes Under The Hood
Not much has apparently changed on the surface of
Connect
Professional since my last review of it in December 2006,
has key changes and improvements have mostly taken place under the
hood, providing what was formerly known as Breeze with the extra
capabilities and performance it needed to stand on a par with its
increasingly numerous competitors.
Acrobat Connect Professional is a fully featured,
high-quality web conferencing technology which brings together the best
facilities and tools to web conference, collaborate in real/time and
deliver live web presentations.
In all of these areas Connect
Professional provides excellent tools, performance and reliability,
while adding a level of interface and tools customization that is yet
unmatched by the industry.
Elegance, efficiency, performance are the first adjectives
that come
to mind if I make an effort to synthesize my sensations relative to
Connect Pro. If I had to use automotive industry terms to make a
description I would say that Connect Pro feels like a BMW with some of
Jaguar-like fine touches.
Here are more details:
Key Features
Connect Professional is effectively a
360° fully
featured web conferencing, live web presentation and online
collaboration tool featuring a persistent virtual workspace, storage
space for content and materials to be utilized, recording and full
scheduling and invitation facilities.
Characteristic of Connect Professional is its extreme
flexibility in
interface customization as the host can literally set/up as many
feature and layout configurations as the types of meetings and
presentations he needs to run.
Connect Professional unique “pods” are a
simple but
formidable solution to such flexibility. Pods are in fact nothing else
but window widgets dedicated to specific functions.
So while they look
as simple floating, resizable windows, they are fully functional
mini/applications that can be placed on the Connect Professional
available workspace in any position or size you may prefer.
There are whiteboard pods, screen-sharing pods, presentation
pods
and display document pods all serving a specific purpose and all ready
to be used and customized visually when you need them.
From this point of view, Connect Professional remains to this
day,
significantly ahead of its competitors, still stuck in old visual and
functional metaphors.
Only very few other conferencing tools today
can provide such breadth of capabilities and as much flexibility in
adapting to different situations and needs.
Here is a list of Acrobat Connect Professional key
features:
Audio and video integration
Connect Pro integrates both two-way VoIP for all meeting
attendees
(the presenter can decide who to activate) as well as video
conferencing without any maximum limit of concurrent video feeds. In
fact, among its many custom uses it should be acknowledged Connect Pro
strong capabilities on this very front.
Teleconferencing
Integrated teleconferencing gives the possibility to all
attendees
to use a toll-free (US-only – see and ask more info for toll free
support in your specific country – while it should be there Adobe
wasn’t able to make it work for my private call with them when it was
needed) phone number to join in with their telephone into the meeting.
Screen-sharing and Remote Control
With much improved performance finally available
Connect Pro is now in the same ballpark as best-of-class
GoToMeeting,
and other popular competitors such as Microsoft Live Meeting, Yugma,
Glance and several others.
I have been literally stunned by the amazing
performance Connect Professional is now capable of, as I was able to
watch a full-motion video with little or no degradation in perceived
frame rate that Peter Ryce of Adobe in San
Francisco
showcased to me via screen sharing.
Keeping in mind that I am 9 time
zones away from Peter and with many Internet hops in between this is
really nothing short of spectacular. The new “Optimize Screen
Sharing” feature in the Connect Pro Meeting menu allows
users to select “Fast Images“,
enabling very low bandwidth consumption when screen sharing fast-moving
multimedia content or video.
A big applause goes to Adobe for having
solved the latency and delay issues that afflicted much of the
performance of Connect in the past. Additionally Connect Pro meeting
participants can control the desktops and applications of other remote
users.
Custom Rooms with personalized meeting room layouts
Connect Pro account owners can create multiple conference
meeting
rooms which are “persistent” and accessible over time.
They do not
disappear at the end of the meeting. Such characteristic is a key trait
of online collaboration solutions, which generally demand spaces in
which object, tools, documents and other information artefacts are
preserved over time and accessible to all of the meeting organizers.
Acrobat Connect Professional meeting rooms are always easy to
access
thanks to personal meeting room URLs, which, as mentioned, never
change. Your custom meeting room layouts and content, complete with
notes and chat, are automatically saved from one meeting to the next.
Live annotation and markup, now even over live video
A long-time key feature of Connect, live annotation and markup
tools
have not changed in this latest release. The most impressive new thing
on this front is Connect ability to annotate even live video that is
being shown to the meeting attendees.
Haven’t seen any other web
conferencing tool capable of doing either thing. A uniquely valuable
feature allows you to save whiteboard overlays in persistent Acrobat
Connect Professional meeting rooms, and then to add them in future
meetings.
Truly cross-platform
Adobe Connect Professional is accessible by users on all
operating
systems including Macs, Linux and Windows PCs. While functionalities
and interface are not identical across platforms the differences have
been further reduced making Mac support and access almost as good as on
the PC side.
Now Acrobat Connect Professional meetings are also fully
supported for users of Mac
OS X 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4, on both PowerPC- and Intel-based
Macs.
Scheduling
Connect Pro integrates a powerful scheduling and invitation
facility, which provides all of the necessary tools to maintain
multiple meeting events under control.
You can also schedule online
meetings from your Outlook calendar, using the integrated address book,
availability look-up and meeting recurrence features. Additionally,
your meeting invitees can join your live sessions directly from within
their Outlook calendars.
Recording
Recording remains a strategic technological advantage for any
provider in this industry as there is so much benefit and indirect
promotion to be gained by the very use of it. Connect Pro integrates a
full recording facility capable of memorizing all of the action,
including audio and video, taking place during a live meeting.
While
recordings can be for now viewed and played back only through Connect
Pro, it is likely that Adobe too will need to embrace the Youtube-like
“share-embed” content distribution strategy so much in demand by final
users.
In reality, Connect Professional
offers a lot more,
by also integrating file sharing, document viewing (supporting any type
of file or document), polling, moderation features, usage reports, an
integrated PowerPoint-to-Flash
conversion facility, moderated Q&A, multiple
switchable presenters and support for video and rich media.
Key strengths
Interface UI
Acrobat Connect Professional keeps its solid position as a
leader in
this space. This is the model to beat. Clean, simple, non-intrusive,
the Connect Professional user interface fascinates any user from the
first second she sits inside a session.
This doesn’t mean that there is
no space for improvement or for making this easier. In fact, Adobe has
inherited this tool (formerly
known as Breeze)
from Macromedia over two years ago, but has yet to make any significant
improvements to its UI.
For those defending position and claiming that
the UI is good as it is, please read my notes in the “Areas for
improvement” section below.
Screen sharing
With
the new Turbo Screen Sharing upgrade
Acrobat Connect Professional has little envy left for its traditionally better
performing competitors. Now performance can be so great that you can
even show a live video to your remote attendees across the ocean. Quite
impressive.
(Read more details above)
Annotation
The ability to annotate on any type of content just when you
need it.
Capacity up to 1500
Few conferencing and collaboration tools can stand the load of
hundreds
of concurrent participants without requiring massive changes to the
server setup configuration.
The new Acrobat Connect Professional Pro
promises reliable support for up to 1500 users. I would love
to test
out on the field this ability and see how Connect Professional really
responds to those demanding events.
When and if Adobe will provide with
an opportunity to run a live event that we will co-promote we will find
out what and if any surprises are to be expected under those kind of
scenarios.
Recordings
Connect Professional event recordings are absolutely
impressive both in
terms of fidelity to the original event as well as in the media
packaging in which they are offered. Not only.
Web pages and content
accessed during a session can still be interacted with by those
watching the recorded edition.
Areas for improvement
Whiteboarding and annotation tools
As much as Connect Pro serves its users with a highly capable
and well
designed annotation toolset, the need for users to live annotate
without being forced to stop, switch mode, change tools or other
unnatural imposed task is what every user expects from a live
presentation tool.
Notwithstanding the above, both Connect Pro and most
collaboration competitors still make live annotation a frustrating
activity, limiting operation space and forcing the user to use awkward
markup tools which produce visual results much worse than those created
by elementary school students on their blackboards.
Recordings and distribution
Recording is only as useful and good as it is my ability to
use and
distribute such recordings. On this front Adobe has certainly wide
margins to do better by providing easier and additional ways to
distribute, access and republish the outstanding quality recordings it
can produce.
Ease of use
Notwithstanding the cleanliness, simplicity and elegance of
the
interface Connect Professional has still wide margins of improvement
when it comes to make its tool easier to learn ans use.
GoToMeeting
remains in my opinion a pioneer and the best model to follow as of now,
for understanding exactly what you need to do when yo want to make a
simple tool, much easier to use.
Connect professional dense text-only
menus are a big obstacle in making it easy for the user to create an
initial, workable mental picture of what can be done inside this
tool.
All menu choices look the same and when you have twenty or
thirty to
look through to find what you are in need of, that starts to get very
frustrating.
Cost of access
Of course, not all web conferencing technologies are meant to
be
low-cost, free or approachable by just any-size company. Fair enough.
There is got to be someone taking advantage of the corporate-enterprise
market, as it is BIG and RICH.
Leaving everything to Microsoft and
WebEx seems wise to no-one and this is why you see wonderful
technologies like this one missing out on grabbing a less lucrative but
much more valuable complementary marketplace made up of professionals
and small business companies.
Even to get inside large organizations
you need to win the favour of IT managers. So why not target with less
feature-rich versions of your flagship product markets like these,
which provide astounding marketing results and provide the true
confidence to the larger organizations to buy into such expensive
corporate licenses.
Editor’s Summary Review
Connect Professional is the leading
web
conferencing, online collaboration and live web presentation technology
available on the market today, when it comes to features, integration,
flexibility and performance.
This is an all-round web conferencing tool that can be adopted
by
mid to large-size organizations, educational institutions and any other
company with a sufficient budget to afford the steep Connect
Professional price tag (starts at $375/month for 5
users).
Yes, if compared with some of its direct market competitors
such as WebEx
and Microsoft
Live Meeting,
Connect Pro pricing is set on solid grounds.
But when it comes to
expand the adoption and presence of this wonderful technology to the
small business world and to professionals who could best reap its
potential Connect Pro falls short in my view of adopting a more
far-reaching marketing vision.
Cheaper Versions For Larger Markets?
Less feature-rich versions of
Connect Professional
could be made available to a larger public with more affordable price
tags, as the competition that comes from smaller companies and simpler
tools is ever more aggressive and effective.
It is only educators,
theoreticians and academics that still pretend collaboration and
conferencing tools that have every single feature you may want to think
of. These very people are often also the worst, most boring and
incapable presenters you may encounter.
Great presenters, successful
business executives and talented trainers all need a fraction of the
tools often requested by these “experts“, who know
a lot, but have yet to learn how to communicate it effectively.
Web presentation sessions have a typical setup requiring
PowerPoint
delivery, annotation, VoIP, text chat and little more. Why not offer a
dedicated solution at a more affordable price? Same for collaborative
sessions requiring screen-sharing, text-chat- VoIP-teleconferencing and
little more.
It is in this direction, in my
humble opinion, that
Adobe could best maximize its marketing potential with Connect
Professional… a wonderful tool, still reserved only for the richer
and more corporate section of the marketplace.
What do you think?
Useful Links & More Information
- Adobe.com
- Get Acrobat Connect Professional
- Acrobat Connect Professional Essential Training
- Recommended Alternative: Try GoToMeeting Free For 30 Days
- Video Editing Articles On WebTVWire
- Video Conferencing On WebTVWire
Original article written by Robin Good
for Master New
Media
and entitled “Web
Conferencing, Online Collaboration And Live Web Presentation In One
Tool: Acrobat Connect Professional Reviewed“on Sept 25 2007. Some Rights Reserved.
