The two discuss the future of streaming video and web collaboration, and what sets ConnectSolutions apart from other competitors. Here are some highlights:

• A premium, full-screen capable HD webcasting product, that works on PCs, Macs, and iPhones
• Web collaboration in a secure environment
• A discussion of how our customers have used social media like Twitter and Facebook to increase audience size
• How ConnectSolutions’ focus on customer service helps ensure customer success by focusing on providing real-world customer solutions

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.

We’ve seen a dramatic increase in web conferencing adoption and usage amongst our customers and partners, particularly as the economy has struggled and organizations look to save on one of the most readily quantifiable budget areas of travel.  The following link is suggesting corporate travel will fall off 15% this year, which when taking into account that the corporate travel sector represents nearly 40% of the overall travel industry size of $85 Billion, is very significant.

Corporate travel off 15%: ouch! | Gadling.com

Fortunately, real-time web conferencing provides a great alternative to travel.  Users can meet face-to-face with clients, partners, and employees without ever leaving their office or home.  This is more cost-effective, while also eliminating the down-time associated with traveling.

One of the core pillars of our one-to-one, contextual collaboration solution is Adobe’s Flash Collaboration Service.  We have a unique partnership with Adobe Systems were we are able to deploy, develop, and deliver AFCS-based solutions hosted on our QuickConnect platform.  Today, Adobe announced several exciting developments around AFCS, including:

• Rosetta Stone is leveraging AFCS for collaborative language learning
• AFCS is now available for Adobe Flash developers (removed the requirement to use Adobe Flex framework).

The first announcement is a great validation of the opportunity organizations have with AFCS, and the second announcement significantly broadens the potential development community for AFCS.

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.

I have heard myraid stories about organizations who have significantly increased their web conferencing usage due to “no travel” restrictions mandated on employees due to the current economic downturn.  Some organizations have even transformed long-standing in-person events like an annual Sales Conference where 10,000 people fly into Las Vegas, into virtual, online events this year.  What’s more is that there is anecdotal evidence that these organizations are looking at maintaining this model even once the economy recovers due to positive feedback from both attendees and organizers.

While this reduction in business travel is certainly not good news for the airline industry, it is definatly good news for the Earth, and also for those of you already using Web Conferencing; for as more and more people become confortable with the idea that, in most scenarios, meeting virtually can be just as effective as meeting in-person, the more benefit you are going to receive from your investment.

There’s a helpful discussion on managing secure web conferencing with Acrobat Connect Pro available on the connectusers.com site available here:

Topic of the Month, April 09, Secure and Scalable Web Conferencing – Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro User Community

From the site:  “With an ever growing list of security standards and compliance initiatives that IT applications must adhere to, deciding exactly how to set up your Connect Pro account can be a confusing. Similarly, as your implementation grows so do the demands on providing a platform that is going to scale with increased usage. This month we’ve decided to focus on helping Connect Pro administrators configure your deployments to best meet these increasing demands and provide tips and tricks for end users on managing meeting security.”

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.