Note: TwitterConnect has been deprecated because of changes to Twitter’s API’s. It has been replaced with the SocialStream pod.
Despite the huge number of capabilities in Adobe Connect, the one question I never have a problem answering is: “What’s your favorite feature?” That’s easy – it’s the Collaboration Builder SDK.
SDK stands for Software Developer Kit and it’s what gives our customers and partners the ability to extend Adobe Connect meetings in virtually any way they’d like. What makes all of this possible is that Adobe Connect is based on Adobe Flash. While most people recognize that Flash eliminates barriers to entry (no additional downloads or installs) and provides a tremendously rich experience – its potential to add additional features to the meeting isn’t always immediately obvious.
In fact, the SDK isn’t even required to load custom flash content into an Adobe Connect meeting room. You can load a Flash application into any share pod and, in most cases, it will work perfectly.
The Collaboration Builder SDK, which also supports Adobe Flex and ActionScript 3, helps to make that Flash content aware it’s in an Adobe Connect room. It gives the author the ability to synchronize all of the different instances of the application so that participants can interact with each other. It can also help by enabling different views of the application based on role (Host, Presenter, or Participant) and can listen for events like someone joining or leaving a meeting.
In this video, I’ll show you one of the custom pods I created to help customers incorporate Twitter search terms into their meetings. We’ve used it for virtual conferences – like the Adobe Developer Week – to allow for better participation and collaboration during the event. It allowed us to incorporate messages from multiple sessions into a single view.