Acrobat Connect Professional, since its days as Macromedia Breeze, has always included video-support.† In fact, the application, by default, includes video capabilities in the default web conferencing layout.†† This video capability provides a rich, engaging meeting environment (often making up for potentially dull slides 
The latest release of Service Pack 3 for Adobe’s Acrobat Connect Professional had a few significant changes, including support for the On2 codec found in Flash Player 8 and 9.† This support was extended to the Presenter Add-In, and this opens up the Connect-platform to support a number of video opportunities moving forward.† We have been working on a prototype recently that leverages several Adobe technologies, and the results have been exciting.
The Prototype:† Real-time streaming of high-quality video through Acrobat Connect Professional
The application was surprisingly simple to put together.† We used Adobe Flash to build an application that connects to a Flash Media Server (I happen to have one at my personal hosting site, MediaTemple), although it could just as easily connect to the Flash Video Streaming Service.† This Flash application subscribes to a stream on the FMS server, and then broadcasts it out to each participate via the share-pod (where I had uploaded the Flash application).† On another computer, I used the Flash Media Encoder 2 application to capture a camera in real-time, and stream it to the FMS server mentioned above.† The encoder allows you to use a variety of settings for your video stream, and uses the On2 encoder.
The results were fantastic!† There are a tremendous number of use-cases that could be supported with this basic set-up (seminars or events, previously recorded training sessions, etc…), so we’ll continue to experiment here.
Continuing on the whitepaper series we developed with Adobe for Acrobat Connect Professional, the following document covers multiple options available to customers for integrating audio with their web conferencing experiences.† The options include audio conferencing bridge integration, VoIP, and a hybrid of VoIP and audio conferencing, and as you’ll see, each of these options has its strengths and weaknesses depending on the use-case.
You can download the whitepaper here: Audio Integration Options with Acrobat Connect Professional
Webinar Wire is a new publishing platform that is likely to be of interest to some of our readers here.† An excerpt:† “The Webinar Wire is a community publishing source for sharing news, best practices, information, stories, and opinions about web-based events and the technologies and people that support them.”
We’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the folks behind this new offering in the past (Ken Molay, John Rourke at Aperio Networks), so we contributed an article today on the importance of some of the “less-sexy” features many organizations are placing particular emphasis on today:† ease-of-use, reliability, and flexibility/integration.† You can read the article here:
Webinar Wire / The Killer Features of Web Conferencing (Not What You Might Expect)
The multi-author approach to this platform is a great opportunity for customers, vendors, and others to contribute to the knowledge around web events, so we look forward to its success.
We’ve partnered with Adobe to deliver a series of whitepapers to assist the Acrobat Connect Professional community. In the next few blog entries, we’ll share this work with our readers.
This first whitepaper is focused on the importance of considering web conferencing integration opportunities with existing systems and workflow. Several years ago, most organizations evaluated web conferencing based upon the feature-set available within the product or solution. However, as organization’s usage has increased, the importance of integration with existing systems and processes has increased as well. Acrobat Connect Professional (Macromedia Breeze prior…) was one of the pioneers in web conferencing to provide a comprehensive set of public, standards-based web services to enable deep integration with existing enterprise systems and workflows. This whitepaper goes into more detail:† Embedded Web Conferencing with Acrobat Connect Professional
Finally, the tradition of deep enterprise integration continues today with QuickConnect from ConnectSolutions. QuickConnect is unique in its support for all Acrobat Connect Professional’s integration interfaces, including: web services APIs, custom pods through the Collaboration Builder SDK, and finally, custom queries to the database tier. This openness translates into enterprise-integration flexibility, while delivering on the promise of enterprise-class reliability, security, and scalability in an on-demand platform.
