Video Conferencing with Live Meeting

Adobe connect is a relatively high-end video conferencing and collaboration tool, that actually comes in two versions: free and pro. Although the free version (Adobe Connect Now) is great if you only want basic facilities like a simple meeting room for up to three participants, we’ll concentrate on the more feature-rich Adobe Connect Pro.

Features

Adobe Connect Pro has most of the same features of both Webex and Live Meeting including the following:

• Up to 80,000 participants in each meeting
• Support for Win/Mac/Linux
• Screensharing
• Whiteboard
• Chat / Notes
• Keep documents and data in a meeting room
• Full VOIP capability
• Include video and MP3 in your meeting
• Reports
• Polls
• Events page
• Content library
• Specialist e-learning features

The admin for setting up meetings and ontrolling participants is done through Adobe’s web-based system which is fairly clear. Inside you can manage meetings, and set up events. You can also schedule training events, as well as view any reports or results of polls that have been conducted during the meeting.

There’s so much in the admin section here that it’s easy to get confused. For one thing, Adobe separates seminars from meetings, which could easily cause confusion if you didn’t know.

A meeting room can be opened from the admin site, and the client is entirely web based. This means you can use it on any computer that’s running one of the main browsers (i.e. Internet Explorer, Firefox). The opening screen for Adobe Connect Pro gives you three options – share your screen, open a whiteboard or collaborate on documents. The left hand side of the meeting room shows you participants, the chat window and notes.

It’s really easy to invite participants, and they’ll receive a very basic email saying “please click on this link”, and from there the console will load in your participant’s browser. Easy!

In larger meetings, participants can use the ‘raise a hand’ feature which can be used during a Q&A session, or if a participant is having trouble in the meeting – Live Meeting also has this feature.

As soon as the video and voice is connected, a little box comes up in the corner to show the person speaking.In our trial, we only got one way video to work. If you want a participant to be given the chance to speak in a meeting, they must be granted microphone rights. Useful for large meetings, but fiddly for small ones.

For e-learning, Adobe Connect is also pretty strong with a ‘learner tracker’ system. This means you can teach and assess students, uploading relevant course materials and tracking their progress. Faciliate discussions between students, and record meetings for future use (or for those students who couldn’t attend the live session). You can also set up ’self-paced’ training – effectively offering students a list of pre-recorded meetings to watch, and the possibility of answering a quiz at the end. Much like Live Meeting you can set pass/fail rates for those quizzes to help you manage students better.

Overall, Adobe Connect Pro is a very nice-looking piece of kit and loads quickly. It is however, a little tricky to get going although we were impressed by the clear emails that are sent as invitations to participants. Good e-learning features, and a lightweight web-based interface make this a good choice for e-learning.