I’m excited to announce the immediate availability of a new service from ConnectSolutions that enables a customer-collaboration solution designed to maximize sales initiatives, improve customer satisfaction, and deliver incremental contribution to the bottom line. connectyou.me provides a real-time channel for customers, partners, and employees to reach the right people within your organization, and is based on the award-winning Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro.
The solution supports a variety of use-cases for online web communication, and provides a significantly differentiated service. Prospects visiting your website or responding to an email campaign can collaborate in real-time with available sales representatives over the web to close business more efficiently. Customers requiring assistance can be connected to your support representatives for real-time incident resolution. Employees requiring assistance can be connected to internal help-desk resources for quick resolution to their questions or issues. connectyou.me provides a real-time communication channel to empower organizations to reach more people while making employees more productive at lower costs.
connectyou.me works with all deployments of Acrobat Connect Pro, including Adobe-Hosted, ConnectSolutions, and on-premise deployments. The service integrates with existing CRM systems such as salesforce.com and Siebel to provide an integrated, multi-channel view of your customers, employees, or partners.
If you are interested in seeing the service in action, please feel free to view a demonstration, or visit connectyou.me for additional information.
On occasion when using your Connect account you will go to the Camera and Voice pod to launch your camera and you get the “gray man” icon even though your camera is plugged in and you know you have used your camera with Connect meeting rooms before. So what might have happened to cause your camera not to work? Remember you can use the pod even if you do not have a camera connected to your computer; perhaps you just want to use the VoIP feature and you have left the camera option on under the pod settings for the Camera and Voice pod.
Whether on a Macintosh, Linux or Windows computers often the same type of activities can impact your camera, the flash player and your meeting room. First, double check that the camera is plugged in to the appropriate port whether it is USB, firewire or you are using a dedicated video card or third-party adapter.
In no particular order there are things we do as a matter of using our computers that may impact your camera not working properly or as expected in a meeting room and none of these common errors are so catastrophic that you cannot recover.
1. Have you recently upgraded your computer operating system or have you installer recent patched or upgrades to the operating system? If so you probably just need to restart you computer after completely shutting it down. This often just clears and cleans things in computer memory and cleans up things on the OS.
2. Have you recently installed or updated other program that might use your camera? A lot of IM clients (like Skype, AIM and so forth) or other video application that allows you to stream or record video to a website or application can request use of the camera during the installation process and of course when you use the camera in that application. If that happened that program may still have control over the camera and the camera driver. When that happens the Flash Player that is running you Connect meeting may ask for the camera and may not be able to grab the video driver and use it for the Connect meeting. The solution is to close your meeting room, go into that other applications/s and check the preferences to release the camera and then re-launch your meeting. If that other application is running in the background when you use Connect your camera can only be grabbed/used by one application at a time and that other application grabbed the Camera before Connect did. In this case close your Connect meeting. Switch to that other application and quit that application and re-launch your Connect meeting room.
3. Have you recently upgraded your camera or the drivers used by your camera? If you have you may need to check that your camera and driver are compatible with your OS and that you have the most current video driver for your particular camera. Rarely a camera driver upgrade can cause a camera not to work. The solution to this is to check your camera and drivers for compatibility for your OS and launch your meeting room.
Often times just closing a meeting room and re-launching the room is enough. Sometimes you need to close and restart the browser. On rare occasions you have to re-start the entire computer. Checking you Flash player setting can help too.
If you have the “gray man” icon in your Camera and Voice pod check your flash player setting for the web camera by following these steps. In your Connect meeting room go to the Camera and Voice pod and click the start camera button. If the “gray man” appears move your mouse over the head of the gray man and right click (or as appropriate for your OS) and the Flash player menu will appear. From that menu choose “Settings…” when the Flash Player setting dialog appears click on the web camera tab; it should be the far right tab closest to the close button. On the web camera tab you will see a drop down menu and from that drop down menu make sure you have selected your camera from the list. There is also a big blue box with a web camera on it on the far left of the dialog box. Go ahead and click on the blue box with the web camera on it and you should see yourself or whatever your web camera is pointing to. You can do this at any time to make sure your camera is working properly not just when you might have an issue. Once you have done this and you see yourself in what was the blue box you are all set simply close the Flash Player settings dialog box by clicking the close button. Close the Camera and Voice pod and open a new Camera and Voice pod and click the start button once again.
You should now see your camera in the Camera and Video pod and be able to share your smile through all your Connect meetings.
We have two upcoming seminars this week based on a solution we’ve developed with Adobe technology (Acrobat Connect Pro, Flex, AIR, AFCS) that you may find interesting. Information on how to register is below:
Adobe in Healthcare: Better Communication for Better Results Webinar
How to increase sales with online training and communication.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. PT
Register at http://www2.eventsvc.com/adobe/event/086a7ef4ad8c417b9098153ea0f3cd56?trk=4
Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 1:00 p.m. PT
Register at http://www2.eventsvc.com/adobe/event/3808a088fd9347c4a62d000d9464e801?trk=4
Life Sciences organizations are being forced to rapidly change the way they engage with healthcare professionals in order to stay competitive in today’s economic environment. Healthcare providers no longer have the time or resources to accommodate traditional on-site visits, as they represent time spent away from patients and associated revenue loss. Life Sciences organizations are also under pressure to reduce the cost of detailing products and to increase productivity without compromising their brands and service differentiation. In addition, it is becoming more critical to train sales representatives quickly and cost effectively.
In this webinar, Adobe® and ConnectSolutions will show you how to empower your organization to reach healthcare professionals through rich, engaging online meeting and eDetailing experiences. You will learn how:
• eDetailing can strengthen the pharmaceutical-physician relationship by offering a flexible and engaging way to communicate. It can save physicians time while cutting the cost of service for pharmaceutical companies.
• Pharmaceutical companies can use eRepresentatives to extend the reach of brand experts, allowing physicians more interaction, in real time, on specific product information.
• Sales representatives can receive training using a virtual classroom, which will save money and allow them to spend more time in the field.
• Adobe’s web conferencing solution Adobe Acrobat® Connect™ Pro with ConnectSolutions can help your organization reach healthcare providers at lower costs while increasing sales and service differentiation.
We have been working with Adobe Systems and the Acrobat Connect Pro software to deliver the industry’s first FISMA-compliant web conferencing solution, as we discussed earlier here. Based on the interest we’ve received from various organizations, we’ve developed a datasheet providing an overview of this solution, which you can download here.
