Acrobat Connect went live recently, and if you haven’t had the opportunity, I highly recommend you take it for a spin. You can learn more about the service and sign-up for a free trial (through the end of the year) by going to:
http://www.adobe.com/products/connect/
There are countless ways in which you can benefit from this service, but here are a few of the ways in which I use the service every day:
- Team collaboration: I regularly use Connect for my team meetings and collaboration. With people located around the world contributing to the product, it’s essential to be able to communicate and share information in real-time to work more effectively. Even when collaborating with co-workers who are sitting in the same room (yes, we still do have physical meetings on occasion), its not uncommon for everyone to be in a Connect room sharing documents while a room-projector goes unused!
- Customer communication: Connect has become a vital tool for communicating more often and more effectively with our customers. Requirements review, roadmap discussions, etc… can all be accomplished through web conferencing and collaboration services.
- Document review: I review a number of documents (specs, data sheets, market data, etc…) over the course of the day, and am often asked to provide feedback/comments/etc… In many cases, it’s easier for me to pull someone into my personal meeting room, so that I can show and speak my feedback in real-time. With support for escalating into my personal meeting room right from within Acrobat 8, I can very quickly launch into screen-sharing and telephony to communicate my feedback.
Finally, given that tomorrow is a national holiday, I’ll let you in on another use-case: it’s a great way to interact with your family if you can’t make it home for the big day. While we haven’t yet completed development on the "turkey-aroma" pod, you can certainly use Acrobat Connect to see your family or friends, and wish them well. One important warning for all of you tech-folks who are looked upon to provide free family IT support: don’t tell them about the "remote control" feature or you’ll be getting a lot more calls for support (trust me on this one…).