Video is required for our weekly meeting

ConnectSolutions has a distributed team, so the very same tools we enable for our customers and partners are the same ones we use each and every day to get our work done.  The team is growing quickly, and with people in various locations, it’s important that we make the visual connection to make for a more engaging and team-bonding experience.  If you’ve ever spoken to someone on the phone over the course of many months or years, and never seen them face-to-face, you know what I mean.  The above photo was taken yesterday during an all-hands meeting we hold once a week.  Each of the remote participants is able to share their video through Adobe Connect.  Sure, we could go out and buy a telepresence system, but with nothing more than a webcam and a laptop, we’re able to deliver a great experience.

We’ve been fortunate to work with several organizations that truly understand the potential of social media, and will be publishing a paper discussing real-impact metrics shortly.  For now, here are a couple of screenshots of organizations using our real-time collaboration platform to reach their audience and embrace social media.  If you want to see a live example, head over to O’Reilly’s Facebook Fan page today to see the Web 2.0 Expo experience.

Acquisition of Xuggle

ConnectSolutions has completed the acquisition of Xuggle, a San Francisco company with incredible people and technology that will help us drive our vision of video-centric real-time collaboration.  If you are interested in learning more about Xuggle’s people and technology, I encourage you to take a look here for an FAQ and supporting material.  For the thousands of you working closely with Xuggler, the open source library for real-time video transcoding with Java, we are happy to announce continued support of the community to ensure you continue to build great things with the technology.

Real-Time Collaboration Platform

We are also very excited to announce the availability of the ConnectSolutions Real Time Collaboration platform.  This platform has been purpose-built to provide private-cloud deployments of real-time collaboration technology, including support for one-to-one, group, and broadcast collaboration.  You can learn more about this platform at the link above, as well as see a discussion we had this week with Paul Ritter, Vice President of IMS, on the subject of video-centric real-time collaboration, social media, and mobile platform delivery.

Telepresence.  These systems are beautiful, exciting, and so insanely expensive that even Fortune 100 companies can’t afford to put them where their employees do their work.

I had to take a three hour train ride, each way, to get to our closest telepresence system and participate in the discussion!

I heard that the other day, and simply had to chuckle.  Organizations are being sold on the “in-person” experience of telepresence, and the resulting increase in employee productivity while also reducing travel budgets.  Yet, these systems are so expensive ($500,000.00 or more, per room, plus monthly recurring fees to support the network infrastructure and maintenance of these complex systems), that even the largest corporations can’t afford to put them in each of their regional offices.  The scarcity of these systems in large corporations is rendering them counter-productive, and actually increasing the amount of travel for some employees like the one I referenced above.  The fact that employees in the field, strategic partners, and customers can’t participate in these experiences is just further insult-to-injury.

For the bitter employee above, there is a happy ending to the story given their investments with ConnectSolutions and our desktop-based web collaboration tools.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrei_dimofte/

Americans logged 694 MILLION business trips in 2008. That’s a lot of missed flights, late check-ins, and time away from family and friends. Believe it or not, 694 million business-related trips represented a decrease of 12% from 2007, and with the economic woes of the past few years, that trend is continuing. The days of traveling for large conferences (think global sales kickoff in Vegas) are also increasingly scrutinized, and as a result, were down 14.5% in 2008. Fast-forward a bit, and you know that today’s economy and travel experiences are met with fewer flights available, at increased costs, with heightened security processes, making for a stressful and unproductive “travel experience.” But wait…there’s more! Nearly a quarter of a billion of the above business trips were conducted by Sales and Management positions within the US. For sales people, this means time away from being productive…even time offline while your competitors hammer away at your leads and customers.

Imagine the impact of saving 2-3% of that expenditure and investing in R&D, or employee benefits, or customer-service programs! It’s time to rethink business travel…

There is incredible value in being face-to-face with customers, but physically being there comes at a cost as described above. With real-time collaboration capabilities provided by ConnectSolutions, millions of meeting minutes are delivered everyday from the comfort of offices, homes, or vacation spots we’ll pretend we’re not at. These virtual meetings and events provide extremely effective face-to-face experiences without the travel, and without the hassle.

Many organizations are spending 5% or more of their gross revenue in business travel. Imagine the impact of saving 2-3% of that expenditure and investing in R&D, or employee benefits, or customer-service programs! It’s time to rethink business travel…

For a great resource on travel expenditures and statistics, please take a look at Business Travel Market Metrics by IHS Global Insight (http://global.ihs.com/), which was the source for the above stats.

LiveCycle Collaboration Service was the subject of a research report by Gartner Research, which you can read here:   http://www.gartner.com/resources/171800/171891/adobes_new_collaboration_ser_171891.pdf

Exciting to see some external acknowledgment of the incredible potential behind this technology framework.

From the report:

Adobe will likely become the first vendor to offer cloud-based component collaboration services that can be integrated into business applications. For example, an enterprise could create a training tool for sales agents where the students act as customers to help each other improve skills for customer interaction and upselling.

I just came across a relatively new resource for developers integrating Connect Pro with various systems via the XML Web Services that have been in Connect Pro for a long time.  In response to a number of questions on connectusers.com about integration examples, this site was created to focus on providing clear examples of uses of the APIs.  For anyone beginning to wrap their heads around these services, I would definitely recommend following the blog.  You can reach it here:  http://www.connectbyexample.com/blog/

Personal meeting rooms with Acrobat Connect Pro are one of the most highly appreciated features amongst our user community.  You can set-up a room, and use it again and again (a virtual office), without having to set-up a new URL each time like other solutions require.  The only complaint I sometimes hear from the community is that they have a very long URL to remember and communicate over phone, email, IM, etc…

To solve for that, we’re introducing a completely free service for Acrobat Connect Pro users.  Piggybacking off of the “url-shortening” services used extensively through Twitter and other social sites, we’ve setup a similar system at:  http://meetnow.in/connect/create.php

Using the service couldn’t be simpler:

1. Go to:  http://meetnow.in/connect/create.php
2. Enter in the URL of your personal meeting room
3. Add a “path” to your new URL
4. Click the magic button, and you’ll be presented with your new URL to copy/paste into email signatures, speak over the phone, etc…

The service works for any Connect Pro meeting URL (hosted by ConnectSolutions, Adobe, or on-premise), and is completely free.  We hope you enjoy, and if you like it, leave us a note in the comments below.

If you are interested in learning more about the technology under the hood of LiveCycle Collaboration Service, I’d suggest reviewing this presentation by Ryan Stewart from Adobe:

http://max.adobe.com/online/session/272

There are a number of exciting announcements happening at Adobe MAX this year, but one that is near and dear to ConnectSolutions is focused on Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service.  LiveCycle Collaboration Service is the new name for what was once Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (and for early followers, CoCoMo), and with today’s announcements, it is now commercially available in two forms:

• Multi-Tenant through Adobe’s hosting platform (you can learn more about it here)
• Single-Tenant (private cloud) through ConnectSolutions’ QuickConnect managed services platform)

Using the Adobe® LiveCycle® Collaboration Service, organizations can easily build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) that include real-time, multiuser collaboration tools.  This means that your organization can explore opportunities to:

• Easily integrate text chat, whiteboard, webcam, and VoIP functionality.
• Rapidly build and deploy applications with the complete SDK.
• Manage user and session data.
• Host applications in a managed environment.

A datasheet is available here from Adobe on the overall capabilities of LiveCycle Collaboration Service.