For years I have used a USB Plantronics headset (a DSP-100), and the microphone with built in digital signal processing, and it has always delivered a crisp, clear audio signal into my meeting rooms.  Along the way I have also had success with the Logitech USB Desktop Microphone, the Plantronics Audio 300 USB, the Shure X2u XLR To USB Microphone Adapter (while not a microphone itself it bridges the XLR audio world into a USB port and XLR is the professional standard) and the Samson UB1 USB Band conference microphone.  They are all great if you are trying to spend under $100 on any one device.

You can spend serious dollars on microphones and speakers but let us focus on microphones and delivering the best audio into our meeting rooms.  There are 3 steps we want to follow with every Connect meeting to deliver the best audio:
1. Proper installation
2. Testing and tuning
3. Watching the Connect User Interface (UI)

Proper Installation:
Whenever you purchase new hardware to connect to your computer you have to install the proper drivers or update the new hardware once it is connected to your PC.  Whether Mac or PC, most hardware vendors make this fairly painless by providing you installation instructions, guidance and drivers to get started, but you need to check and confirm.  Check that your microphone cable is plugged in to the USB port, check that your operating system does indeed recognize your new hardware and make sure, if applicable, the microphone is actually turned on (yes some devices have a physical on/off switch).  I mention this as today many operating systems try to assist you by auto-detecting new hardware and installing the proper drivers and instructions; so trust, but verify this did actually occur.

Testing and Tuning:
Go to your operating system and check that the microphone is recognized.  This is often done by going to the ‘Sound’ control panel/preferences and checking on how your computer has assigned the audio input and output.  Also check to see if any other application on your computer has usurped control of the microphone; Skype did this to me for the longest time before I turned off its preference.  If you have tested your operating system and confirmed your settings, let us do the same thing in your Connect meeting room.  In your Connect meeting room do not hit the VoIP talk button or Lock icon, instead, tune your new microphone to the meeting room using the Audio setup wizard.

Adobe Connect audio setup wizard

Under the Connect meeting menu choose Meeting > Manage My Settings > Audio Setup Wizard…
This will open the wizard dialog box and guide you through 5 simple steps to tune all your audio to your meeting room.
You only need to do this once, NOT for every meeting you host.

Watching the Connect UI:

Okay.  The O/S is ready.  Your room is tuned.  Let us now start using Adobe Connect’s built in VoIP to broadcast your voice to all those in our meeting and of course into our archives if we record your meetings.  Let us take a quick look at the VoIP button and that small black triangle to the right of the hands-free lock icon this is where you set the volume and choose ‘One’ or ‘Multiple’ speakers.

Adobe Connect VoIP settings

After setting your preferences, choose the ‘Lock’ icon, this will allow you to work hands free and is a more convenient way to speak during a meeting as it leaves you hands free to text chat or work with content in your share pod.  If you are broadcasting your audio and working hands free you should now see a speaker icon in the Attendee list pod (convenient to know who is speaking) and a small green bar moving back and forth under the VoIP ‘Talk” button. You are now all set and sending out audio.

Cool USB Microphone Options
You have lots of options when it comes to microphones that you can use.

As I mentioned earlier I continue to use my Plantronics headset still today, but for certain setups or meetings you may want something entirely different.  Here is a list of some microphones that might suit you or your meetings:
The Rode Podcaster microphone at over $200.00 (US) not the cheapest but a great microphone for any use.

The Blue Snowball is between $75.00 – $100.00 (US) and a great condenser microphone with a retro feel.

The Phoenix, Solo USB Microphone work hands-free and headset-free with this conference room style microphone that will set you back just over $100.00 (US).  Ideal when you are in a physical conference room with many attendees sharing one Connect meeting room connection.

You can go out and purchase one of the aforementioned, look around and find other quality hardware out there (ask your friends and colleagues what they use) or if you have a microphone or headset that works and meets your needs just make sure you have everything setup and tuned up.

If you do all I mention above then you can rest assure that “they will hear you now”.

Ryan Monger at Adobe just put this great article up at ConnectUsers.com on the X2u XLR-USB Signal Adapter for getting that great quality audio down from those XLR systems into the USB connection on your laptop without requiring a dedicated sound card.

Check out the article and all of the ConnectUsers.com website as it has tons of resources around Adobe Connect Pro.

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.

The definitive article on this from Alistair Lee at Adobe systems can be found here at the Connectusers.com.

Connect Pro Mobile for the Apple iPhone

I hope this is just the beginning of such developments and innovations around the Connect platform enabling users to communicate, collaborate and even learn in the mobile manner that best suits their needs.

These efforts truly go a long way toward making Adobe Connect Pro the tool of mass instruction and collaboration.

As I am a Blackberry user and not an iPhone user this does make me consider purchasing one or at the very least borrowing my wife’s iPhone and trying out Connect Pro Mobile once Adobe makes it available to the public.

I am sure as this effort moves forward more Connect Pro features and enhancements will be made available on this mobile platform. The mere idea that I can be involved in a Connect Pro meeting from my phone; in addition to my Mac, my tablet and Windows PC , just makes me smile.  Having to cart around all these other much larger devices is not all the much fun. Besides, I always have my phone with me and it starts up a whole quicker than my computer too.

Ken gave this webinar alongside Adobe using Adobe Connect Pro but it was not the traditional or expected comparative, competitive fare that said how or why this feature works better in Adobe Connect v. Webex rather a more compelling presentation was made on what we all can do to use the features in Connect in other ways that promote more interactivity with the audience and keep everyone engaged in any meeting or presentation topic we might deliver.  He started with a quick multi-choice poll where everyone chose five of ten presentation points; the top five things you would like to discuss and the bottom five that are of lesser interest, and then spoke to those items in succession.

One of the first things I noticed in the Connect meeting room with Ken was a simple layout.  5 pods total.  Two on the bottom for chat (one for attendees to chat amongst themselves and the other to send questions to Ken) above that a share pod with a ppt file and to the left side the attendee list pod and a polling pod.  Now it is the polling pod asking two simple questions that is key here.  The choices were:  “This topic is interesting, keep going” and “We have covered enough on this topic, move on”.  This pod was open the entire time and as subjects moved forward and questions came in from attendees real-time feedback was being given to Ken and the attendees could see the vote percentages in real time too.  This was insturmental to keeping the presentation moving along as everyone had a voice in the pacing and content of the meeting.  Voices, questions and comments were also heard (read) in the chat pods as attendees shared the opinion and thoughts on why their presentations succeed or fail.  This constant, polite and professional dialog also kept the meeting flow moving right along and when question on one topic faded Ken led us all on to the next topic.  If your next Connect meeting lends itself to this type of format use polling in a similar fashion, not to sample final opinions on a subject but rather to promote dynamic interaction on the subject at hand.

The second thing I noticed was a lot of trust Ken had with the attendees. Having such open chat pods can invite passions to flame up and comments to get desultory and yet that never happened here during the entire hour.  Now he laid out the ground rules at the beginning and gave us all some guidance but things just went smooth and no one got out of control.  If someone had Connect has the ability to remove attendees from the room and of course the chat pods could always be closed but that was not needed here.  The biggest question I recall was “How do you prepare for holding such a meeting?”  All this real-time feedback and progress could cause your one hour meeting to last 35 minutes, some topics might not get the attention you think they deserve and you could run out of material before the meeting end time; and that’s okay.  If you are prepared to talk to the topics, you do so at the depth and scope prompted by the attendees and your audience has told you so then you have more than likely had a successful meeting.

The interactivity is also likely to bring up a few new topics you might choose to address in this meeting or use as topics in a future meeting.  Either way you engaged your audience and if they told you in real-time “move on” then keep it moving.  I cannot recall the last time I or any speaker was chastized for ending a meeting early. Can you?

Now looping the entire presentation is simple enough.  You can go into Adobe Presenter, choose Presentation Settings, Playback and select “Loop presentation” (see image #1 below).  This will cause the presentation to play in its entirety at the timing and settings you have established and when the final slide is reached it will automatically jump back to the beginning of the presentation.

Now setting up looping audio can be a bit more complicated but not impossible. The first thing to remember is that Adobe Presenter only supports one stereo audio track in the audio settings (see image #2 below).

What we have in image #2 is a small bit of audio on Slide 1 of our presentation. If you wanted that audio clip too effectively loop and play on every slide you could manually copy and paste the audio clip across each slide in the “Edit Audio” dialog (see image #3 below). Very tedious but it works.

Now do not go in there and drop an audio-only .swf file on the slides that will not work as you might expect. Each slide with the .swf file on it will treat that .swf file as a separate instance of the audio file and you will end up will a sort of infinite-loop. I think we called it singing in the “round” when we were camping and sitting around the camp fire where one person would start to sing and then a few seconds later the next person would start and so forth. This is not the type of audio playback you want to achieve in your presentation.  Perhaps in future versions of Presenter Adobe will make this easier or more intuitive but for now this is what we have to do.

If you have the time and want to do the work open up an audio editor like Adobe Soundbooth CS4, which supports multiple audio tracks and do some audio mixing or editing there.  You could have one track that is your background audio and another that is a voice-over, narration or other audio clip.  From Soundbooth, save or export the entire file as an .mp3 audio track and import that file into Presenter using the “import audio” setting.  I suggest importing to slide #1 and click ok.  Then go into the “edit audio” setting and adjust the slide markers (those little gray boxes with red lines that show you where one slide finishes and another begins) by selecting them and moving them left or right to overlap the audio waveform displayed in the dialog.  Ideally you keep the audio as brief as possible or use a very short background audio clip when doing this mixing in Soundbooth so that you do not run out of background audio before you run out of narration audio.

Also, Adobe has just released Presenter 7.0.5.  You can use the ‘Updates…’ option in Presenter to get the latest version or click here

We hope you find the website more useful, attractive and informative. It is all still there just maybe in a slightly different spot or location; kind of like a new release of that desktop product you have used for years where the menus and options have changed or the keyboard equivalents have been re-assigned.  Well I don’t think we made such deep changes just a better and more functional site.

Podium. Where to begin. I suppose it all started when we had folks from across industries approach us about wanting massively large web events or broadcasts that went well beyond web conferencing or traditional web seminar models and capacities.  The questions were “Can we have a large event in the tens-of-thousands of attendee range and still keep the attendee engaged and involved, at a level and in a manner that the attendee chooses, or with only the select features we as the broadcasters might want utilized?”   Well many meeting, customer consultations, developer arguments, usability testing sessions and social networking and other feature discussions later we have a hit product up and running.

The tag line says it all:  Reach a global audience with your message through highly engaging, highly scalable webcasts. High Def quality audio and video with a global reach across Mac, Windows and UNIX in an environment that is FISMA compliant (that means the Federal Information Security Management Act for the implementation of and compliance with secure data management – it a government thing) that basically means really, really secure.  We put many hours of development, testing and Q&A into Podium to date with more to come as the product evolves and that word evolves really speaks to our development philosophy. Our team members have backgrounds with various software and hardware companies and we made a committed decision to have Podium evolve with new features as we can implement, test and deploy them and not get stuck in the product release cycle that so often bogs down software companies.  We are also not going to keep the product in beta forever it’s out there now and ready to use.  So many thanks to our initial “guinea pigs”, partners and testers that helped us get to this point.

While not a new product it’s a new name and go-to-market attitude with Managed Services for Adobe Flash Collaboration Service; what we formerly referred to as FlashGrid.  Why the change?  All around allot of people reaching out to us thought that perhaps we had a different flavor or technology as it relates to the Adobe Flash Collaboration Services and we don’t’ – We just let you deploy your AFCS applications in a much bigger way.  So to clarify that issue and reinforce that if you have an application that needs to scale in a really big way (that means global), across your enterprise (that means deliver to tens-of-thousands) and do so on a global basis (that really means a global basis like worldwide) in a safe secure, environment that has years of deploying such applications and frameworks than our Managed Services for Adobe Flash Collaboration Service are for you.  We still recommend that you start with Adobe for developing your application and testing it during the proof-of-concept stages but when you are ready to deploy and GO BIG and make some serious dollars and generate lots of traffic give us a call.

New People!  This may be the best part of being part of the connectsolutions team, you work with highly energetic and creative people and we are always looking for a few good people to join us.  If you think you might fit in on our team check out our careers page and see what opening we have and send us your information.  We have a growing business and our recent hires are great new additions to team that have a fanatical commitment to customer service and success.

New customers too!  Well I cannot and do not name drop but if you look at our solutions portal you can see a partial list of our ever-growing customers in both government and enterprises markets; my favorite part of the word enterprises is that it means tens of thousands of people are using a solution that makes their day-to-day work and collaboration easier.  That tells me that not only are there lots of new things going on around here at connectsolutions but also with our global customers too. Glad to see that we are all so busy in these challenging times and using our resources so effectively it is a great new day!

Our free training registration portal is located here:  http://www.connectsolutions.com/training/ and is open to all our customers.  We have scheduled the sessions to be focused one hour periods that will be recorded and can be referred back to for your follow up or that of your colleagues or entire organization.  The best part; well okay maybe the second best part, is that the sessions can also be customized (that makes the FREE part the best I guess) to a very specific topic or feature and we will create a unique classroom training session for you and your colleagues within your organization that is only open to your organization at a time that is mutually agreeable to all of us.

We are fanatical about customer support, service and satisfaction and if our scheduled sessions interfere with your work day let us know an we can arrange a special traning session just for you!  Check out the traning portal for the current schedule and to register for the sessions.  If you think a custom session would be better for you and your team contact our team evangelist (tom@connectsolutions.com) and lets get everyone up to speed on how to best use those Connect accounts!

But can more be done?  Can we go beyond the “Customization” tab put forth by Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional? Sure and here are a few ways to customize your meeting rooms.

One of my favorite ways to customize a meeting room is to use the “Room Background” setting in the menus: Meeting / Room Performance and Appearance / Room Background.  Use an image file, like a .jpg or better yet a .swf file for a more expressive or animated experience.  My preference is for that which works best as a room background and depending on your skills, experience or content on hand one format might be better than the other. Remember you need to upload these files to your Connect server before you can load them into the meeting room; you cannot load a “Room Background” from your desktop like you might upload a file into a meeting room share pod.

For images I get the best results with a .jpg file at 1024 x 768 pixel size image with a modest amount of compression applied to it.  Use whatever image editor you prefer.  I use Adobe Fireworks but that other image editor they have is fine too and probably has more expressive capabilities.

For .swf files I use either Adobe Flash or Adobe Illustrator and publish them and Flash Player 9 files.  If the background was created in Adobe Illustrator I use an 800 x 600 canvas and then just get creative.  The design capabilities of Illustrator are exceptional. Crisp text, the effects, the range of colors and the object options make all the things you create very clean and professional.  If I have something created in Adobe Flash I follow a few basic rules. 1) actionScript 2.0 only and keep the coding to a minimum, 2) when using actionScript I never reach for resources outside the authoring file (can you? Yes. However if you get all complicated and dynamic it can makes things really slow down in the meeting room),  3) I keep the animation to a minimum as it can be distracting and since other pods are going to cover the background it might go from distracting to annoying, 4) don’t use the components that require Flash Player 10 or actionScript 3.0 and finally 5) TEST, Test, test.

You really need to test your .swf files whether from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Flash or any other tool that outputs .swf files.  Not all authoring tools and vendors create the same quality of .swf file output.  Using a room background while similar to loading a .swf into a share pod is not exactly the same.  So test you room backgrounds in your meeting rooms and if it is an animated .swf let it run for a few minutes and then open pods, switch layouts and make sure your wonderful creation is not impacting your meeting room in an unexpected way.

Okay room backgrounds are great but what else is possible?  You can begin by using the share pod to upload a PPT files, .jpg, or .swf file that has our organizations brand, logo, crest or your personal photo; then I typically delete the entire name from the pod title bar.  Yes it can be blank but it does make it more difficult to locate later if you close the pod.  If you use blank spaces (the spacebar) in the titles the same difficulties apply.  Remember to save your meeting rooms as room templates once you are happy with your customization so that you can have that consistent custom experience and so can all of your meeting room hosts.

Make your own custom pods!  This is the highest level of customization that you can achieve. You do this and do it well you are a true Connect Master.  Alistair Lee at Adobe is one of those masters but he may never admit it. Check out all his creations at the Acrobat Connect Pro Exchange which is really a tribute to Alistair and his productivity as a developer.  Of course, ConnectSolutions is not standing on the sidelines we have developed a few custom pods for our customers and will be coming to market with a few of them in the near future. Keep checking our website for more details.

Okay go forth and customize your Connect experience – your server, your meetings and your events.  Adobe Connect provides many wonderful UI elements but with a little time and effort you can create a tailor made experience that exceeds the out-of-the-box offering.

That is really what I am going talk about here.  That fun little menu choice “Organize pods” located under the Pods menu in the main UI of your Connect meeting room.  Here you can not only “Delete” content, “Select Unused” content but “Rename” content and renaming things can help Hosts and Presenters alike in a meeting room.  By default content you have loaded in the share pod is listed in alphabetical order but often I (and more often than not someone using my room or co-presenting with me) want to have things displayed in a logical order that matches the presentation I have outlined on paper or the order in which I have the content and presentation ordered in my mind.

I have found the best way is to go into the “Organize pods” dialog box, select the content, select “Rename” and add a #1 or #2 and so on to the front of the content items; especially useful if your PowerPoint files have similar names of titles or if you have multiple presenter or speakers. This forces the numbered ppt files to appear at the top of the list in the Share pod when you load them using the “What do you want to share? – Documents” accordion menu.  I also tend to put a blank space, or two, in front of any file that I use in the share pod that might serve as the first item, welcome slide or such item that needs to be the first thing attendees see when they enter that layout. This is especially useful when someone else in using the room and making the same or similar presentation or if you have a newbie whose comfort level with Connect is not as high as yours.

So simple yet and yet so easy a way to keep your content, your presenter’s content and all the various files you upload into the share pod organized.  So don’t just upload “stuff” and have it listed there take a few seconds and put some order to the material. It may save you minutes down the road and make all your meetings all the better.