Adobe Connect Review

Full review

Looking at the Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro solution we found a lot of features for your money and a range of tools for handling successful online meetings. Take a look at the full Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro offering to see how it compares to other providers in the field.

Sign up

Adobe offers a number of different options for setting up a web conferencing service with them. You can choose the hosted option where you simply need Flash, an internet connection and a web browser and you are up and running. Organisations can also add Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro into their own infrastructure, behind the firewall, with an on-premise plan. There’s also a managed service that combines the on-premise service with full installation, upgrades and management included. The benefit of the hosted plan is the lower investment you need to make in terms of price and commitment, while if you choose the on-premise solution you get to customize the software and integrate it into your business’s system. The Adobe Connect service for individuals supports online meetings and webinars and allows hosting for up to 25 people per meeting.

Conferencing features

Within the Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro system are a full range of features that allow you to share your screen and applications, work in real-time with colleagues across the world, and connect on a number of different devices including Blackberry and Android smart phones. Attendees don’t need to download anything and can turn up to the meeting through a regular web browser. Construct and store documents that you work on at the meeting in a digital meeting space and record meetings for future reference. The solution for webinars offers password-optional event entry and additional tools for generating attendees.

Presenter features

Presenter tools and features are extensive and you can use the wide range of features to handle all your meeting needs. Create specific meeting rooms for different meeting purposes and save these as templates in order to take benefits from a more streamlined way of running meetings. You can store any work-in-progress in these meeting rooms in order to be available to you when you return to work on the next occasion. Presenters collaborate with participants by whiteboarding ideas, chatting, and sharing content but you can also reserve content for your own eyes in an area that cannot be seen by meeting participants.

The sharing of documents and applications takes place in “pods,” spaces with different functions including polls, whiteboards, video share, file share and notes. You can position and resize these pods in order to create the best working environment. You can also give participants different roles during the meeting, for example the ability to submit questions, share documents or chat. Adobe has a good feature included for creating break-out “rooms,” different meeting rooms for continuing a VoIP discussion or conference call alongside the main meeting.

Video & audio

DVD-quality webcam streaming is integrated with the audio and video conferencing capabilities, meaning you can add a multimedia side to your presentation. All this takes place with Flash already so participants don’t need to download Flash in addition to attending the meeting. Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro also gives you the opportunity to record meetings, adding an automatic indexing feature so that participants can skip to the parts they are interested in. The recording feature is useful for creating an easy-to-use index of issues under discussion or training sessions.

Security

With the US Department of Defense running Adobe Connect Pro you would expect the security to be tight. Adobe provides advanced security and privacy controls on online meetings and information sharing. SSL encryption offers all this protection in real time. And if you have the on-premise or managed service plan you can take advantage of additional security control measures.

Ease of use

If you want to use all the features and tools available in the best way possible you’ll need to spend a little time learning the system. Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro is a feature-packed solution and not something you can use immediately out of the box. However, once you are familiar with the application it is easy to keep track of what you are doing. Resizing and reorganizing the pods you use for online collaboration works well and the process is straightforward.

Help & support

Get support from the Adobe customer services team and technical advice 24/7 by phone or email.

Overall

Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro is probably more suited to large companies and organisations and those offering eLearning, an area in which Adobe Acrobat excels. The relatively high cost and the time needed to learn the process will put casual users off. Larger organisations, however, will appreciate the ability to scale up significantly in terms of users and participants.