Making Multiple Adobe Connect Meeting Rooms Appear as a Single Meeting or Seminar

All-hands meetings and large town-hall seminars that exceed the size supported by any single Meeting or Seminar room in Adobe Connect may still be supported. A skilled host or team of hosts can use two or more Connect Meeting rooms and project them to participants as though it were a single room. We have hosted Meeting in excess of 5000 users by distributing them across Meeting rooms and servers.

The basic outline of the workflow to split a large meeting onto multiple servers includes placing separate Meeting rooms onto separate servers and distributing attendee subscribers into the various Meeting rooms on the separate servers.

It is prudent not only to have more than one Meeting room in these cases, but also to make sure each Meeting room is hosted on a separate server in any cluster to add robustness to the meeting. Load-balancing is a wonderful thing and you should always use it to its fullest potential.

Assume an example of a three-server cluster/pool of Connect servers (Adobe hosted clusters have many more than three servers) and that you want to split a Connect Meeting onto all three servers; a simple 3-server cluster is depicted here to use as an example:

For a working example, let’s place a Connect Meeting room hosted on each server; to do this you will need three separate URLs: One URL for each 1/3^rd  of your attendees. Getting the attendees distributed among the three rooms can be tricky. One effective technique is to either send out three different invitations, with each targeting 1/3^rd of your audience and each offering a different URL, or just point everyone to a page with  all three URLs and request/instruct the participants to alphabetically arrange themselves in subsets of users by URL selection. That way it is not random; I have seen this technique work fine; here are sample meeting URLs based on our example cluster pictured above:

• https://connect.domain.com/splitmeeting1
• https://connect.domain.com/splitmeeting2
• https://connect.domain.com/splitmeeting3

To make certain the each meeting is hosted on a separate server (rather than all three on one as load-balancing could easily prescribe), it will require some effort to keep entering and leaving the room until your meeting lands on the server you want.

Note: There is a feature request open with Adobe Connect Product Management to add a URL parameter or API to select a specific server host a specific Meeting on demand but this is not yet a feature available in Adobe Connect.

Using multiple browsers may be helpful as well to mitigate any caching variables. Working on this well in advance of the large Meeting or Seminar is prudent as there is a session timeout factor to consider. The load balancing algorithm will eventually get the sessions distributed but it may take some time and effort.

The way to tell which server your Meeting rooms are hosted on is simple: In any meeting room click Help and while holding down the shift key click About Adobe Connect.

This will pop up an RTMP string that will identify the server that Meeting is hosted on and also which server a client is coming through as each client can be using multiple servers (just to add not only to the complexity, but also the overall robustness). See this example from one of The Adobe Connect Hosted Cluster Meetings:

The hypothetical RTMP strings for Meetings on each of the three servers depicted in our simple example in the server cluster pictured above will look something like this:

rtmps:// connectmtg01.domain.com/?rtmp://connapp01:8506/meetingas1app/847483075/1086833045/
rtmps:// connectmtg02.domain.com/?rtmp://connapp02:8506/meetingas2app/847483076/1086833046/
rtmps:// connectmtg03.domain.com/?rtmp://connapp03:8506/meetingas3app/847483077/1086833047/

The first name in the string (connectmtg0#) is the built-in Connect Edge server and the second name (connapp0#) is the Connect origin server hosting the meeting.

Each Connect server runs both Adobe Media Server (AMS) and Tomcat together. The second name is the important one for our technique of splitting the Meetings onto separate Adobe Connect servers.

In the hypothetical RTMP string samples above, I have made these artificially neat and tidy, the truth is that the first part of the string can be any of the three for any meeting participant regardless of the application server hosting the meeting. For example, you could come in to connapp01 through connectmtg03 – any combination is possible. Load balancing is done at more than one level as Connect leverages both a hardware-based load-balancing device and also its own internal clustering capabilities; combinations for the various clients (including the hosts and presenters) in our example cluster depicted  above might include:

rtmps:// connectmtg01.domain.com/?rtmp://connapp02:8506/meetingas2app/847483076/1086833046/
rtmps:// connectmtg02.domain.com/?rtmp://connapp02:8506/meetingas2app/847483076/1086833046/
rtmps:// connectmtg01.domain.com/?rtmp://connapp03:8506/meetingas3app/847483077/1086833047/
rtmps:// connectmtg03.domain.com/?rtmp://connapp03:8506/meetingas3app/847483077/1086833047/
rtmps:// connectmtg02.domain.com/?rtmp://connapp01:8506/meetingas1app/847483075/1086833045/
rtmps:// connectmtg03.domain.com/?rtmp://connapp01:8506/meetingas1app/847483075/1086833045/

The key to remember is that the second name is the one that matters; a distribution of participants approximating 1/3^rd on each server is the goal targeting: connapp01, connapp02 and connapp03. After this is set-up, the pre-meeting server distribution part is complete (this should be done at least one hour prior to the meeting).

Use Enhanced Audio Video and Optimize for large audience under Meeting Information in Adobe Connect Central:

Note that I have also highlighted checking the browser entry option to allow a diversity of clients and to leverage additional ACTS proxy servers within the Adobe Connect Cluster. This is not necessary but any additional resources server-side will only help.

Next comes the creative hosting venture in the split Meeting context: As the host, you will need all three Meetings open in front of you to manage them as one. From the perspective of the participants, there is only one Meeting (ignore the host behind the curtain).

Be sure to hide the Attendee List Pod in the Presenter-only area as it will only manifest those participants in that specific Adobe Connect Meeting thereby allowing a peek behind the curtain thereby misrepresenting the size of the entire three Meeting combination.

And here is where the techniques are very much up to you:

• Splitting video among the three rooms is possible using a third-party options such as Splitcam
• For audio, if using integrated audio, be sure to use the same integrated telephony number for all three rooms.
• If using VoIP, then allow one speaker only at a time to send audio via VoIP.

Some ways in which you can limit the amount of data being processed in your room and to improve the overall performance of these sessions are:

• Optimize room bandwidth. In a Connect Meeting, at the top of the screen click on Meeting > Preferences. Under the preferences menu you are able to adjust screen sharing, video and VoIP quality setting separately.
• Turn off cameras whenever they are not in use.
• When in use, multiple cameras should probably be set to mitigate bandwidth consumption.
• Turn off VoIP if not talking.
• Participants should directly connect to the fastest internet connection available and be on a dedicated DSL connection, at a minimum.
• Clients or hosts on wireless – the clients may use it with a strong signal but hosts should be wired
• Shut down Email, instant messaging, and any programs not being used for the presentation.
• Shut down any VPNs as a VPN will potentially cause a performance hit driving up latency

For sharing video across three Meeting rooms, you may share the screen: In room 1 where you place the video pod. In rooms 2 (and 3, etc) use a Share Pod that shares the video pod from room 1. To help accomplish this, the host joins room 1 twice. Once as a host (for access to the backstage); and then as a participant. The participant user then maximizes the video. Rooms 2 and 3 share that full-screen video. Typically that full-screen video is on the laptop screen. Rooms 2 and 3 are on different monitors.

The reason to join as a participant is to prevent any pop-ups from appearing (e.g. participant has raised their hand). The reason to maximize the video on the laptop screen, is because it’s the smallest screen size and looks best when shared on larger monitors.

Other topics might include ensuring all hosts/presenters/producers all join the main Meeting room (room 1); handling Questions typically through the use of Q&A pods is best; and then copy/paste questions from rooms 2/3 into the main room); managing ASL and Captions (not much to do here – as long as ASL joins the main room and has a separate video dedicated to them and is shared in the video pod).

While the example provided is of a Meeting or Seminar split across Meetings on servers within a single Connect cluster, a similar approach is possible with servers in different clusters. For example, a customer who has US and EMEA based servers in separate clusters with separate domain names can run separate Meeting that appear as one:

• http://connect.emea-domain.com/splitmeeting
• http://connect.us-domain.com/splitmeeting

Two key considerations when attempting this are audio options and network distance to the host or presenter:

Audio options: Make certain the audio option is unaffected by network distance and is uniform across clusters.

Network distance to the host or presenter: A team of hosts is better suited than a single host so that a host in one region is not driving content in a Meeting in a distant region. When participants are experiencing <100 msecs of latency on the their regional cluster, a host in a separate region may be experiencing >250 msec of latency; this can have an affect on the uniformity of the Meeting experience.  A regional host can better react to prompts to flip slides via the audio connection and can help with uniformity of the regional Meetings.

There are many option such as to add hybrid events (where there is also an in-person meeting that is the basis of the virtual meeting). Hybrid adds a level of complexity of audio/video. Even without hybrid, we tend to recommend integrating a telephone line for hosts/presenters and VoIP-only for participants.