by Guillaume Privat, Director, Adobe Connect Business Unit
Yesterday, Apple launched the new iPad. Yet another technical marvel from the Cupertino firm. What I found the most interesting is from the launch presentation was some of the numbers Tim Cook unveiled. One statistics in particular: 15.4 million iPads sold last quarter, which is more than the number of PCs sold by any single PC maker in that quarter.
It is clear that Tablet are fast becoming the computing device of choice of many knowledge workers. Yet until now, most web conferencing vendors assumed that people would use tablet just to consume meeting from their device. Not to run meetings. With the increasing adoption of tablets, it is clear that customers will expect to do tablet to tablet collaboration.
As a result, when assessing web conferencing solutions, decision makers should consider not only whether you can attend a meeting, a webinar or a virtual classroom from a tablet, but most importantly, can you host a meeting from a tablet and collaborate tablet to tablet.
If your webconferencing solution supports only screen sharing, it is not going to work on tablet. No tablet operating system supports screen sharing today and it is not clear that it is in the roadmap of any. Most importantly, the overall user experience of multi-tasking on the tablet does note lend itself well to screen sharing. As a result it is clear that most collaboration will happen on up-loaded documents.
Uploading documents into a meeting space is not straightforward. Many solutions convert your powerpoint file into a viewable format by running processes locally on your desktop (often calling Microsoft Powerpoint executables). This mode of conversion is no longer available on the tablet, so the conversion needs to happen in the cloud.
If you are evaluating a web conferencing vendor an plan to use the solution for table to tablet collaboration, you should make sure that:
1) they offer other sharing options than screen sharing and
2) that their document conversion upload is server based (and does not occur locally).
Adobe Connect supports screen sharing and document upload for multiple format. All our conversion is server based and does not require mandatory client side conversion.
Our Adobe Connect Mobile 1.7 application enable not only to attend meetings, but also virtual classrooms or seminars. It enables user also to host a classroom, a meeting or a webinar. Our mobile 2.0 currently in beta will enable you to do much more and provide a great tablet to tablet meeting experience.
Can not wait to run my next Adobe Connect meeting on the new iPad !