Adobe Connect
Features
Web conferencing the easy way
Important Info
Empower Your Employees with Cutting-edge Features
Ensure easy meeting access and intuitive experience
Ensure instant, easy access to collaborative online meetings, eLearning courses, and webinars with colleagues across the enterprise and with partners, customers, and prospects—from any location at any time on virtually any device.
Deliver rich, highly collaborative interactions so your teams can complete work faster
Engage your meeting participants with rich multimedia and share animated presentations, images, audio, video, and more. Enable attendees to participate from virtually any device in a variety of ways, including interacting with collaborative rich media applications, sharing content, exchanging chat comments, and voting in real-time surveys.
Capture audience attention and keep participants engaged
Make your presentations stand out and captivate your audience with interactive rich media content that you can easily share. As event host or presenter, you can also promote direct interaction with participants and keep them engaged using real-time whiteboard discussions, polling, chat, and live Q&A.
Rapidly create and deliver high-impact online training and on-demand courses
Easily create and deliver compelling, self-paced online courses; conduct highly interactive virtual classes; and efficiently manage training programs.
Meet your organization’s security and compliance requirements
Exercise complete control over access, content and application sharing, security polices, and auditing. Choose from hosted, on-premise or managed services deployment options, depending on your business and security needs.
Integrate with your existing systems and extend core Adobe Connect capabilities to meet specific needs
Protect existing and future technology investments using an enhanced Collaboration software development kit (SDK) and published APIs for easy integration. Customize and extend your web conferencing solution using Adobe’s robust ecosystem of advanced integration partners.
Top New Benefits of Adobe Connect 8
Easier to use
A primary focus of Adobe Connect 8 is usability. With a new simplified interface featuring enhanced layouts and better organized controls, accessibility functions, and one-click sharing, Adobe Connect is now more powerful and easier to use. New usability features include:
- Simplified user experience—use Adobe Connect more intuitively. With the new user interface, you can easily discover all available functions and features through better organization and prominent display of the most important and frequently used controls and capabilities.
- Enhanced audio and video controls—Access audio and video controls centrally. They are prominently displayed and logically organized at the top of the meeting bar. All related capabilities are now centralized and easily accessible directly from each control.
- Unified attendee management—access all participant management functions from the Attendee pod. Hosts can change participant roles using simple drag and drop and assign video, audio, or screen-sharing rights using mouse-over controls. Presenters can quickly get a vote count using the new status view and easily control breakout sessions using the new breakout view.
- Optimized screen use—size your screen area for optimum viewing. The meeting interface rescales intelligently to provide optimum viewing experiences for any screen size or resolution. Presenters can now size their own version of the presenter-only area individually without impacting the view of other presenters.
- Improved accessibility—navigate the Adobe Connect 8 interface completely via keyboard. Several hot keys are also supported for direct access to important functions and capabilities. Significant improvements in screen reader compatibility include JAWS and Win-Eyes support and accurate focus-location tracking by screen magnification software.
Better collaboration
To collaborate effectively, dispersed teams need to be able to share ideas and communicate freely, as well as capture decisions and results. With Adobe Connect 8, collaboration capabilities are now more flexible and robust, enabling teams to drive better results. New collaboration features include:
- Advanced chat—organize chat into separate tabs for public and private conversations and reduce errant chat messages. Participants can choose the color and text size of their chat messages. Hosts can control whether private chats are allowed in a meeting room.
- Rich Notes pod—use rich formatting capabilities in the Notes pod, such as bold, italics, multiple colors, and bullets. The Notes pod also includes productivity and accessibility improvements like support for keyboard shortcuts. Hosts can save notes as an RTF file on their local drive and then email them to multiple participants directly from the Notes pod interface.
- Simplified Q&A pod—easily manage questions between multiple presenters during meetings. Presenters now have their own view for managing and answering questions and can assign/ reassign questions, see who is answering, or answer the question privately or publicly. Participants have a separate view to ask questions and see answers.
- Enhanced whiteboard—collaborate more effectively with enhanced whiteboard tools. In addition to the standard shapes available, you can create custom shapes and add text to shapes with just a simple double-click. The whiteboard can also be used in the overlay mode on top of a shared document to zoom and pan along with the document.
Richer audio and video experiences
Adobe Connect 8 allows you to provide rich multimedia experiences to your participants with integrated audio and video conferencing. New features include:
- Two-way Universal Voice—bring the audio into an Adobe Connect room and provide two-way communication between VoIP and telephone audio to deliver richer experiences for all participants.
- Video conferencing integration—leverage existing investments in video conferencing solutions by integrating your video telephony devices supporting SIP/H.264 with the Adobe Connect platform (for on-premise deployments only). With this new feature, meeting hosts now have the option of bringing a live audio/video broadcast stream directly into an Adobe Connect meeting room.
Improved access and extensibility
Busy professionals working on multiple projects with global teams need the ability to track down key people, instantly collaborate, and come up with responses quickly to meet project milestones. The optional Adobe Connect desktop client allows workers to do just that. Plus, new and enhanced plug-ins for Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Creative Suite® 5, and Microsoft Office Communications Server clients improve productivity, as does an enhanced Collaboration SDK. Access and extensibility features include:
- New optional desktop client— set up and manage meetings more easily with the new optional Adobe Connect Desktop AIR® client. Invite participants to meetings right from your desktop. You can also instantly search for recorded Adobe Connect sessions, and download and playback recordings locally, even when offline.
- New and enhanced plug-ins— use the Microsoft Outlook add-in to schedule Adobe Connect meetings from your Microsoft Outlook Inbox based on your Exchange Calendar Free/Busy time. Using the Adobe Connect Add-in for Microsoft Office Communicator, see online and available contacts, then invite them to meet in your Adobe Connect room using your existing MOC client.
- Enhanced Collaboration SDK—write to more than 100 Adobe Connect APIs to customize the user interface, extend security features, or add virtually any functionality to Adobe Connect you desire. The new SDK also supports Flex®, Flash, and ActionScript® 3 for richer, more dynamic interactions and even more engaging online collaboration.
Increased security features and enterprise support
Adobe Connect 8 is web conferencing for the enterprise. With strengthened security capabilities and improved support for virtualization and meeting resiliency, Adobe Connect is even more suited for enterprise deployments. New features include:
- Passcode-protected meeting rooms—set and manage passcodes over some or all meeting rooms to better manage participants and control meeting access. Hosts can set and reset passcodes that participants are required to enter upon login, protecting sensitive information.
- Session management—manage meeting session length for strengthened security and finer grained control of user sessions. Allow users to hold sessions for as long as necessary, while ensuring that idle sessions time out, reducing the risk of unwanted meeting access.
- Thin client support—provide rich media collaboration in virtualized environments with support for Citrix XenApp 6. Improved delivery and performance of Adobe Connect 8 on Citrix XenApp 6 enables organizations to deploy rich, engaging web conferencing software throughout the enterprise while enjoying the lower TCO and increased agility of thin client virtualization.
- Ubuntu 10 add-in—experience full-featured meeting host capabilities with a new add-in for Ubuntu Linux® users. Now Linux users have the same capabilities that Microsoft® Windows® and Mac users do when hosting meetings.
System requirements (Client): Hosted and licensed deployments
Windows
- 1.4GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 or faster processor (or equivalent) for Microsoft® Windows® XP or Windows 7; 2GHz Intel Pentium 4 or faster processor (or equivalent) for Windows Vista®
- Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 2; Windows Vista Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise; or Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, or Ultimate (32-bit edition, or 64-bit edition with 32-bit browser)
- 512MB of RAM (1GB recommended) for Windows XP or Windows 7; 1GB of RAM (2GB recommended) for Windows Vista
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8; Mozilla Firefox 2.x or 3.x; or Google Chrome
- Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1 for all users (hosts, presenters, participants, and administrators)
Mac OS
- 500MHz PowerPC® G3 or faster or 1.83GHz Intel Core™ Duo or faster processor
- Mac OS X v10.4–10.6 (Intel); Mac OS X v10.4 (PowerPC)
- 512MB of RAM (1GB recommended)
- Mozilla Firefox 2.x or 3x; Safari 2.x; or Google Chrome
- Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for all users (hosts, presenters, participants, and administrators)
Linux
- Presenter/Hosts: Ubuntu 10
- Attendees: Ubuntu10; Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 4.x, 5.x; Novell SUSE® 9.x or 10.x
- Mozilla Firefox 2x or 3x
- Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for all users (hosts, presenters, participants, and administrators)
Solaris
- Mozilla Firefox 2x or 3x
- Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for all users (hosts, presenters, participants, and administrators)
Mobile
- Apple devices: iOS 3 or 4, created for Apple iPhone; compatible with Apple iPad and iPod Touch (3G or 4G connection recommended)
- Android™ devices: Android 2.2; Adobe AIR® for Android; compatible with HTC Nexus One and Motorola Droid (3G or 4G connection recommended)
- Citrix XenApp6
- Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for all users (hosts, presenters, participants, and administrators)
- Bandwidth: 256Kbps (512Kbps recommended) for participants, meeting attendees, and end users of Adobe Connect applications. Connection: DSL/cable (wired connection recommended) for Adobe Connect presenters, administrators, trainers, and event and meeting hosts.
Server system requirements: Licensed deployments only
Windows
- Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 with Service Pack 2 or Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 Server
Virtual environments
- VMware ESX 4
Database
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005 with Service Pack 3
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 with Service Pack 1
Supported operating systems
- 3GHz dual-core Intel Xeon® processor (2GHz quad-core Intel Xeon or faster recommended)
- 4GB of RAM
- 2GB of available hard-disk space for Adobe Connect Enterprise installation, 150GB of available hard-disk space for content storage; disk space requirements will increase as more content is stored
- NTFS file system (FAT32 file systems not supported)
- DVD-ROM drive
- Adobe Connect Server deployment with SSL enabled
- SSL Hardware Accelerator or built-in Connect Enterprise software SSL
- Adobe Connect Server deployment on virtualized systems: VMware ESX 4
Shared storage requirements
- Disk specs: 10,000–15,000 RPM — Fibre Channel preferred
- Network link: TCP/IP — 1GB I/O throughput or better
- Controller: Dual controllers with Active/Active multipatch capability
- Protocol: CIFS or equivalent
Note that your needs will vary depending on deployment size and usage.
Network requirements
- 100Mbps Ethernet (1Gbps recommended)
Port requirements
- 1935 (RTMP), 80 or other HTTP port, 443 if SSL is enabled; 25 for SMTP (optional); 1433 for external database (optional)
LDAP directory servers
- Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) with Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003
- Active Directory for Windows Server 2000 or Windows Server 2003 or later
- IBM Tivoli Directory Server 6.1
- Novell eDirectory 8.8
- OpenLDAP 2.3.35
- Sun™ Java™ System Directory Server 5.2
Adobe Connect Edge Server
- 3.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor (dual-core Intel Xeon or faster recommended)
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (all 32-bit editions)
- 2GB of RAM (4GB recommended)
- 100Mbps Ethernet (1Gbps recommended)
Universal Voice using Flash Media Gateway
Supported operating systems
- Microsoft Windows 2003 Server (32 bit) with Service Pack 2
Hardware requirements
- 2GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processor (3GHz quad-core Intel Xeon recommended)
- 4GB of RAM
- 2GB of available hard-disk space for installation; 10GB of available hard-disk space for operation
- NTFS file system (FAT32 file systems not supported)
- CD-ROM drive
Network requirements
- TCP/IP — 100Mbps (1Gbps recommended)
- Port 5060 TCP
- An additional two ports are required for each concurrent meeting that uses Universal Voice; these ports are configured as a range (example: 5,000–6,000 would support 500 meetings using Universal Voice)
- 100Mbps Ethernet (1Gbps recommended)
While Flash Media Gateway can be installed on the same system as the application server, it is recommended that it be installed on a separate system.
