Introducing Adobe Connect 8

I don’t know if you had the opportunity to attend an online video conference, with hundreds of people that MUST connect at the right time. If you connect too early, you have to wait until the conference starts, and if you come a few minutes later, you may have missed a few chapters.

This week Adobe launched their 8th version of Adobe Connect. It comes with an highly improved and intuitive user interface. Adobe Connect 8 can be compared with Mac OS… everything is drag and drop. You can grant video, audio and sharing capabilities to a desired user with drag and drop, without affecting other users.

Adobe Connect 8 allows enhanced whiteboard markup features for Microsoft PowerPoint, PNG/JPG images, PDF documents and video content streaming. Adobe Connect 8 was built using Flash and ActionScript 3. Developers can acces the new SDK  which contains more than 100 APIs for Flash, ActionScript and Flex allowing them to create custom plugins and extensions.

New Innovations and Benefits:

– Advanced UI, friendly and eye-catchy which allows participants, hosts and presenters easier access capabilities; they even have the capability to adjust the size of the conference room in real time;
– Sharing methods implemented, chat discussions, videos, notes, Q&As, whiteboards, and to assist collaboration.
– Improved two-way Universal Voice which allow users to connect to different conference providers from any Adobe Connect room and the ability to serve a bipartite communication between any participants, no matter if they use VoIP or other audio devices.
– Adobe Connect offers the possibility to integrate with almost any video conferencing software, allowing participants to add external video or audio streaming directly into Adobe Connect room.
– Adobe Connect Desktop (can be installed using Adobe Air), which enables users to manage one or more meeting rooms without a web interface. The desktop application also has the possibility to download session transcripts for offline processing.
– Adobe Connect Mobile gives the possibility to participants to participate at meetings using own mobile devices. Adobe Connect Mobile runs on iPhone and iPad(from Apple), also was migrated for Android (Google) and basicaly any mobile device which supports Flash technologies.

Adobe Connect 8 runs perfectly on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux distributions and other operating systems. After Apple dropped Flash support for iOS, Adobe had to find a solution. They developed Adobe Connect Mobile Client. There are some alternatives if you want to compare Adobe Connect with other systems: Cisco Webex, Citrix GoToMeeting and Microsoft Live Meeting…

Adobe Connect is available as a hosted or managed service: annual subscription, perpetual license or even monthly/pay-per-use for small businesses and individuals. They provide 24×7 support and, as a matter of security, you can choose SSL encryption for your web conference. Adobe Connect 8 will have more than 10 language versions: English, Portuguese, Brazilian, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Spanish.

I would be interested to know if you have participated to a web conference and if you had any issues.