Musings of a Marketing Maven

A few weeks ago a colleague recommended I try Adobe’s new web conferencing service, Adobe Acrobat Connect. The pricing and value proposition looked pretty interesting for a consulting business like mine, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I signed up for Adobe’s 15-day free trial and did some internal tests mixing presenter and guest roles on a variety of Windows PCs and Macs.

At first blush the UI seemed pretty straightforward, but the software crashed on more than one occasion. Performance seemed pretty good, based on my experience connecting via Comcast cable.

Based on the number of crashes (even in my limited tests), I concluded the service was too buggy to try with a client; however, my father needed remote tech support this weekend so I decided to experiment with him to see if Acrobat Connect’s desktop sharing would work in a simple one-on-one situation.

He’s pretty technically savvy but even so, he found the UI to be too confusing. He was unable to make the service work when he was in the presenter role, “broadcasting” his Mac desktop. As a result he consistently drove bugs (an infinite set of nested windows, each with a successively smaller view of his desktop).  He also complained that the service is too slow when connecting via DSL.

We wasted about an hour trying to make Acrobat Connect work, and never really succeeded in doing so. Based on this experience, I am definitely not going to use this service with clients. Thankfully Adobe’s 15-day trial enabled me to reach this conclusion before having to commit to a subscription service. I also avoided the risk of a potentially embarrassing experience with clients.

It’s too bad, because Adobe’s value proposition seems attractive for smaller consulting firms.