Author Archive for Tom Person

Just wanted to make a quick mention of the Adobe Learning Summit that takes place in San Jose, CA on November 9th at the San Jose Fairmont Hotel.  Welcome and opening comments by Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer of Adobe Systems, Inc. is just the beginning.

As Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro is a huge part of Adobe’s elearning strategy this conference is a great opportunity to meet Adobe product team members, industry experts and peers using Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro and many other Adobe tools and solutions.  There are a number of sessions around Connect Pro and how to get the most out of the solution.  The opportunity to network and meet others using Connect Pro for communication, collaboration and eLearning is truly outstanding.

You can get more details and register here.

Often when using a Connect meeting room or attending a meeting it astounds me how often a meeting host or presenter will underutilize the pods.  There are only eight basic or standard pods and of course you can make your own pods that do wonderful things or download pods from the Adobe Exchange for Connect to impact your meeting room or how the attendees interact in the room.  But the eight basic pods offer you an opportunity to expand attendee interaction in a meeting and provide attendees direction even when you are not there live.

If you did not know you can double-click the title bar of any pod and re-name the pod.  Simple, select the title bar with your mouse, move your mouse over the current title and double click to highlight the current title, hit the delete key or just start typing a new title.  Okay but why? This question is what you may be asking right now so let me explain.

Pods are great for their functionality and performance in a meeting but they are kind of generic.  Share, Attendee list, File share and so on.  If you take the time to think about the nature of your meeting room and the context of how it will be used for communication and collaboration by your attendees you can make the room perhaps a little easier for newbies to understand and maybe easier to navigate for those in a hurry.  Is your meeting live?  Is your meeting going to be recorded? Is your meeting room open 24×7 for people to enter?  Are the attendees new to the Connect Meeting room experience?  Let’s take the scenario of new employee hires who are also new Connect users entering a meeting room for the first time for an employee orientation session.

As you know a participant in the meeting room sees things a bit differently than meeting Hosts or Presenters and as participants they cannot use all the pods the same way so right from the beginning a newbie might start clicking on the pods just to see what happens.  If you were to re-label some of the pods they could provide some guidance even if you are not in the meeting room or have walked away for a moment before your meeting begins.  I often re-label the chat pod “Type your questions here” so that it is obvious what you can do with this pod during the meeting.  I also add or enter into the chat pod the text “Welcome” and “Please type any question, concerns or comments you have during a meeting into this pod”.

The share pod is another pod that is great to re-name or label.  If you have a photograph of yourself or the presenter for the session upload that into the meeting room and then re-label the pod with their name, title, credentials or contact information.  In this scenario I often see people re-label the pod “Representative”, “Live Representative” or “Customer representative” I think you get the idea here.  Label this picture whatever makes sense in the context of your meeting room and makes a personal connection to the meeting attendees especially if you are not using the “Camera and Video” pod.  I also add#1 or #2 to the front of the name of any content I put in a meeting room that corresponds to the sequence of how that material is to be displayed.  This helps me keep things in order and if others use my room they can see the numbered lists too

The pod with the title that I change 99% of the time in every meeting when I use that pod is the “File Share” pod.  Why?  Well the share pod and file share pod both have the word share in their title but share content in entirely different ways.  The “Share” pod is a great way to upload specific file types or select a window, application or your desktop and broadcast that content out to all the attendees in the meeting room.  The “File Share” pod is a great way to distribute files of any type to anyone in the meeting room or even to those with access to the meeting archive.  I re-name the “File Share” the “Distribution pod”. Often giving it a much longer name like: “Distribution pod: select any of the files below by clicking on them and selecting the Save to my Computer button”.  You get the idea this is a nice way to provide direction to newbies in the meeting room and to anyone who may be accessing the meeting room archive long after the meeting has ended.

A fairly simple idea and concept that can provide guidance and instruction to meeting room attendees. You can also rename pods using the “Organize Pods…” menu at the bottom of the Pods drop-down menu. You can also rename layouts or create new layouts with the “Organize Layouts…” option under the Layouts drop-down menu.  The most important aspect of re-naming things is to keep the names contextual as to how they might be used in the meeting. Establish a naming convention and stick to it and in my opinion avoid “blank” or “no name” pods.  While possible it makes it real difficult to find the right pod if you close it especially if you have more than one blank pod.

So what’s in a name? A whole lot so use them wisely.