Monthly Archive for September, 2007

MeetingPulse update

September 28, 2007 by Chris Tennant

I’m working on an update to the MeetingPulse application, using a pre-release version of the next beta milestone of the AIR SDK.  The killer new feature in this next version is the ability to pop up notification alerts ("toasts").  What this means is that with the next version of MeetingPulse, you will be able to leave it running in the background, and then get an alert when someone comes into one of your meeting rooms.  Not only that, but the alert includes the name and email address of the person who has just entered your room.

Very cool stuff. Look for an update soon!

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MeetingPulse Milestone: Over 100 Registered Users

September 25, 2007 by Michael Fitzpatrick

We’re excited to see the interest from the Acrobat Connect community around MeetingPulse! Over 100 people have registered the application since we launched the beta a short time ago, and it has been great hearing how these users have benefited from it. If you haven’t had an opportunity to install the application yet, it’s available at: http://labs.connectsolutions.com

MeetingPulse users can be found across a variety of markets, including: Education, Government, Consulting, Telecommunications, and High-Tech. It is great to see the application adoption across this varied landscape, and we look forward to continuing to improve upon the application.

Please continue to send in your feature enhancements. We expect to provide an update (your app will let you know when its available…) as soon as the next release of AIR becomes available. First on the list of enhancements (which requires AIR Beta 2) is taskbar notifications (also known as “toasts”).

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Did You Know: Best Practices for Coordinating Dial-In and Web Conferencing

September 25, 2007 by Michael Fitzpatrick

We’ve all experienced the dreaded loss of ten to fifteen minutes at the beginning of a virtual meeting to coordinate the various aspects of the meeting (audio conferencing, web conferencing, IM’ing people to see if they are going to join, etc…). Unfortunately, this churn often eliminates any potential productivity gains experienced with web conferencing. Guy, over at Burton Group, has a humorous if not painful, account of this happening to him as well. As I stated in my comments on his blog, MeetingPulse assists in reducing this churn, by providing desktop notifications when web conferencing participants join a conferencing room.

Here’s the original article:
Pattern Finder: Vendor Oops #1: Getting the Dial-In Number Wrong

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Acrobat Connect Professional Gets the “Good” Treatment

September 25, 2007 by Michael Fitzpatrick

Robin Good, who has extensive experience in evaluating web conferencing solutions, has produced a great review of Acrobat Connect Professional. Robin has been a fan of Acrobat Connect/Macromedia Breeze for many years, and it looks like the latest update doesn’t disappoint. If you are looking for a nice summary of the key features of Acrobat Connect Professional, than this is an excellent quick-read.

One area he didn’t touch on (I’ve left a comment on this as well) was the choice that customers have in deployment options with Acrobat Connect Professional. There are few products in the industry that support hosted and on-premise deployments, and of course, now with QuickConnect, a hybrid of those two options. This flexibility is important for customers, particularly as contextual collaboration becomes more standard for organizations adopting web conferencing.

Best Of Breed Web Conferencing, Online Collaboration And Live Web Presentation Into One Tool: Acrobat Connect Professional Reviewed – Robin Good’s Latest News

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QuickConnect Dashboard: the Agent

September 17, 2007 by Chris Tennant

The next piece of the QuickConnect infrastructure that I want to focus on is the Agent. While the Control Center has a global view of all Connect instances, each Agent is responsible for monitoring and maintaining just one Connect instance.  And so the Agent is critical to the value that we add over and above other Connect deployment options.

Here are some of the tasks that the Agent performs.  First, it checks the health of its Connect instance every 15 seconds, and takes immediate action if Connect does not respond.  Second, it performs regular database tuning and analysis for Connect.  Third, it manages backups for Connect.  Fourth, it does anti-virus scanning and intrusion analysis for its Connect instance.  And those are only some of the things that the Agent does. 

I’ll have more to say about the Agent in the coming weeks.  Next up: remote monitoring.

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QuickConnect Dashboard: the Control Center

September 12, 2007 by Chris Tennant

Over the next few days, I will be diving into the different components that you can see in the Dashboard network diagram. The diagram gives our customers a real-time view into the status not only of their Connect instance, but also of the QuickConnect components that are monitoring and managing their Connect instance.

As the name suggests, the Control Center is a key part of the QuickConnect infrastracture. Working in conjunction with the Agent, it collects the reporting data that you see in the Dashboard (for example, new user sesssions per hour over the last 24 hours). It collects data from our remote monitoring sites, and tabulates it to identify any problems with internet access to your Connect instance. It is also responsible for keeping a list of past and future system events, such as maintenance windows and system upgrades.

In the unlikely event that your Connect instance becomes unavailable, the Control Center will know within at most 15 seconds. We get notified immediately, so we can take action, and you’ll also see the problem immediately within your Dashboard (Connect will turn red). The Control Center keeps tracks of all outages, so that you can go back after the fact to see exactly when they started and when they ended.

I want to emphasize again that our commitment is to ensure that your Connect instance stays up. But we are also committed to giving you detailed information when there is a problem. By far the most common scenario will be tracking actual downtime during scheduled maintenance. You may have scheduled system maintenance, for example, from 6pm to 8pm on Saturday evening. Because the Control Center keeps track of exactly when your Connect instance is unavailable, you will be able to see after the fact that the actual downtime during the scheduled maintenance was 6:45:10 through 6:52:15.

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Sneak Peak: QuickConnect Dashboard (On-demand Gets Transparent)

September 12, 2007 by Michael Fitzpatrick

Acrobat Connect…Like You’ve Never Seen it Before…

When we set out to build QuickConnect, our on-demand platform for web communication, we decided it was critical to be transparent with our customers in every way, including our operations and performance.  The result of this committment is the QuickConnect Dashboard, which we’ll preview now.

The QuickConnect Dashboard is designed to provide customers with extremely detailed insight into their Acrobat Connect deployment’s health, performance, and management.  The Dashboard puts a friendly interface on the innovative infrastructure and software ConnectSolutions has developed to provide the industry’s most reliable on-demand platform for Acrobat Connect.  The next several blog entries wil cover the architecture and overall solution in more technical detail, but the following gives a sense of the user experience when interacting with the QuickConnect Dashboard:

Secure Login (Single Sign-On with Acrobat Connect):

The Dashboard authenticates using your Acrobat Connect server to provide a simple, yet secure, mechanism for logging in to your Dashboard account.

Real-Time Display of QuickConnect Platform and Components:

The screenshot shows the multiple components that make up the QuickConnect platform, including: Acrobat Connect, the QuickConnect Control Center (which oversees and manages every customer’s deployment), QuickConnect Agents (which analyze and self-manage your isolated, secure Connect deployment), and multiple remote monitoring access points to ensure accurate insight into the overall system.   The QuickConnect Dashboard displays the status of each independent architectural point in the platform, and updates in near real-time.  More detail about each of these components of the QuickConnect platform will be discussed in future articles.

Global View of Each QuickConnect Location

This view provides users with a real-time view of the current state of each of QuickConnect’s deployment locations.

QuickConnect News & Announcements

In addition to the variety of visualizations used to communicate the status of the QuickConnect platform, the Dashboard also provides access to announcements (such as scheduled maintenance), support updates, and other news including Blog updates from ConnectSolutions.

Instant Access to Acrobat Connect Usage Data

The Dashboard provides instant access to usage data such as the number of sessions used in the past twenty-four hours.  This provides trending insight to determine peak load times, etc…

But Wait, There’s More…

The features above are just a few of the capabilities the Dashboard provides Acrobat Connect customers on the QuickConnect platform.  In future entries, we’ll discuss additional reporting options, integrated support ticketing, and the knowledge-base, all of which are designed to provide complete transparency and ultimately, customer success with Acrobat Connect.  If you can’t wait, feel free to contact us to receive a demonstration.


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Did You Know: Instant Tracking and Email Alerts of Presentation Views

September 10, 2007 by Michael Fitzpatrick

File this feature under incredibly useful but virtually unknown.  Acrobat Connect (and Macromedia Breeze, and Presedia before that) has a great feature for tracking presentation views by individuals.  If you are a sales rep, and want to be alerted when a customer has viewed a customized proposal presentation you provided, or a support rep who wants to be alerted when an individual has reviewed a technical presentation, then Acrobat Connect’s "Email Link" feature is a great tool for instant notification of presentation views.  Here’s how to use it:

  1. Log in to Acrobat Connect and go to your Content Library
  2. Select a piece of content, and view its "details"
  3. There is a navigation option called "E-mail Link"
  4. Enter in the email address you would like to send the presentation to, along with any custom email contents you’d like to include.
  5. Send away!

What Happens Next?

Acrobat Connect sends the email to the individual.  The email includes a custom link that, when clicked, takes the user to the presentation (or content) for viewing.  That custom link ALSO tells Acrobat Connect to send you an email alerting you to the fact that this person has just viewed your presentation.  You can then follow-up with the individual immediately or later, knowing that they have viewed the content and may be interested in your products/services/content.

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WebAssist and ConnectSolutions Announce Partnership

September 5, 2007 by Michael Fitzpatrick

We’re excited to announce a partnership with WebAssist today.† We think the combination of our QuickConnect platform with WebAssist’s NutShell and integration services will provide a great combination for customers looking to deploy enterprise web conferencing, or move from stand-alone web conferencing to unified communication.

You can read the official press release here:

WebAssist and ConnectSolutions Broaden Adobe Connect Professional Reach through Partnership

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