In our experience with hundreds of web conferencing customers over the past several years, network traffic has been a common source of discussion during deployment efforts. As we are crafting deployment architectures with customers and their IT professionals, many leap to the hardware and software requirements for Acrobat Connect. While these are important aspects of the deployment architecture, we end up talking more about the customer’s network capacity and associated web communication traffic. As the article highlights below, the emergence of web communication technology in the enterprise is resulting in significant increases in network traffic.
For most organizations, the network bottleneck tends to be the wide-area network capacity. The ability to maintain appropriate levels of network capacity for business operations (email, website traffic, VPN, etc…), while also making extensive use of web communication technology, has the potential to cause capacity limitations. However, as we’ve been working with customers, it’s become clear that QuickConnect’s on-demand platform removes this constraint by hosting and managing Acrobat Connect’s servers outside the firewall. While internal employee collaboration still requires some WAN-based traffic, external users (such as regional offices, home offices, partners, customers, and contractors) connect directly to the QuickConnect platform without ever consuming the customer’s network. This allows the organization to scale its adoption of web communication technology, without the potential costs associated with increasing external network capacity.
More information on network utilization and Acrobat Connect sizing will be available shortly in a whitepaper that ConnectSolutions has written for Adobe Systems. We’ll be sure to post it here, so check back.
ArticleSnatch Blog ª Blog Archive ª Unified Communications Bring Network Traffic
Ever needed to share a very large file with someone inside or outside of your organization, and been unable to do so through email due to file-size limitations? Acrobat Connect solves this problem, and adds some compelling document collaboration capabilities at the same time. Here’s how:
- Create a meeting room and use a custom URL to make it easy to remember (/yourname, or /files, …)
- Add a fileshare pod to your layout. At this point, you’ve got everything you need to upload and share files with others. You can leave the room "open to anyone who has the URL," or lock it and require login, depending on what files you want to share.
- If you’d like to do more with Acrobat Connect, you can also add note pods, chat pods, etc… and add more collaborative context to your filesharing.
There’s one additional benefit: you also have automatic tracking and reporting of who has entered your room and viewed or downloaded the content…
Acrobat Connect web conferencing document collaboration
One of the new features in SQL Server 2005 is database mirroring ó the ability to replicate data in real time from a primary database to a mirror, or backup, database. There were ways to accomplish this in SQL Server 2000, but they had significant performance problems. As of SQL Server 2005 SP1, mirroring is production-ready and performs well.
Thereís just one slight problem with using this feature with Acrobat Connect ó the JDBC driver that Connect uses is not mirroring aware. So you can mirror your database, but you canít take advantage of the automated failover features built into SQL Server 2005, because Connectís JDBC driver can only see the primary database. In the event of a primary database failure, you need to bring the mirror online, then go into the Connect console manager and change the database settings to now point to the mirror, and finally restart Connect. This is a time-consuming process. For example, there is one large Connect installation, with a dedicated IT team managing Connect, where this process can take half an hour or more, during which time Connect is entirely offline.
At some point, the Connect JDBC drivers will be updated to a newer version that is mirroring-aware. Until then, Connect administrators will be able to use mirroring only for ìwarm backup.î This means having a system administrator and a DBA on call and available 24/7 to perform the failover.
Or, of course, you can do what we recommend, which is to use ConnectSolutions to manage it all for you 
By optimizing the failover process, we are able to move a Connect installation from the primary database to the mirror database so fast that meeting users will notice only a short ìblipî, before their meeting continues as before. And we do this 24/7, 365 days of the year. Itís all part of our fanatical focus on being the very best, bar none, at managing Connect.
Iím excited about the MeetingPulse application ó it really lets us showcase some of the possibilities for rich client-side interaction with Connect. Adobe AIR is still in Beta, but I had very few problems working with the "Moxie 2" SDK ó itís proved very robust. I ran into one issue with a null pointer exception when clicking on the datagrid (a variant of this bug: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-10979), but I was able to work around it in the source for DataGrid.as. MeetingPulse has gone through quite a few internal versions and should be really solid ó if you run into any problems, please let me know. The AIR upgrade process is slick and easy to use, so I can deploy a new version of MeetingPulse very quickly, and then the next time you launch the application, youíll be notified that there is an upgrade available. The upgrade installs itself (thanks to the AIR upgrade code) in much less than a minute.
MeetingPulse also demonstrates the kind of UI we are going to be using to let customers manage their Connect instance. Look for much more about this in the near future ó youíre going to be able to see real-time graphs showing system availability over time, youíll be able to schedule the application of Connect service packs, and many other features to help you get the most out of Connect. Throughout the objectives are transparency (youíll have full access to the status of your Connect account) and ease of use. The look and functionality of MeetingPulse is a small preview of how this will all work.
Iím finally in a position to apply all the lessons that Iíve learned over the course of seven years of working with Breeze/Connect (starting at Presedia in 2000, then at Macromedia, and finally at Adobe). This is going to be great!
We’ve just released a Beta version of an application we’re calling "MeetingPulse," and encourage you to give it try. The application is free to the Acrobat Connect community, and is the first destkop application designed specifically for the Connect solution. Some highlights include:
- Instant access to your Acrobat Connect meetings
- Notification when a participant joins one of your rooms
- Meeting creation and invitations directly from your desktop
- Access to your content, training, and meetings without having to re-login
- Graphical usage report for your individual meetings
- Support for ConnectSolutions’ QuickConnect platform, Adobe’s hosted version of Acrobat Connect, and licensed versions running on-premise.
- Works on both Windows and Macintosh platforms
The application takes advantage of Adobe AIR, which while still in Beta, provides a great cross-platform solution for building desktop applications. To download MeetingPulse, please visit: http://labs.connectsolutions.com
We look forward to hearing from you!
Acrobat Connect Adobe web conferencing AIR Flex
