Web conferencing goes ‘always on’, easy and cheap

For a monthly fee, the Acrobat Connect hosted service provides users with collaboration tools including screen sharing, white-boarding, chat, video conferencing, and audio conferencing in personal virtual meeting rooms. Adobe says the service is being offered on free trial starting in November. Underpinning the service are the new Adobe Acrobat 8 and Acrobat Connect and Connect Professional, which rely on a web browser and nothing more sophisticated than the ubiquitous Flash Player software. “Web collaboration needs to be as easy as sending and viewing a PDF document, so anyone can reap the benefits of meeting online in real-time,” says Tom Hale, senior vice president, Knowledge Worker Business Unit, at Adobe. “Since nearly everyone already has the Flash Player installed, Acrobat Connect makes it extremely easy to go from looking at your computer screen to sharing it with others, regardless of their platform or version of software,” he adds. With the service, users choose an easy-to-remember web address for their online personal meeting room, with unlimited usage for up to 15 participants for their monthly fee. There’s single-button ‘Start Meeting’ access from Acrobat 8 and Adobe Reader 8 software, and users can also launch Acrobat Connect directly from a document so they can start working together immediately. Acrobat Connect Professional extends the facilities to online meetings with multiple presenters, online events, and live virtual classrooms. Beyond support for large meetings, reporting, content management and so on, this also provides for interactive multimedia, telephony, and VoIP. Developers can also use the Acrobat Connect Collaboration Builder SDK to create custom interactive applications such as simulations.