Musings of a Marketing Maven

Last win­ter I tried an early ver­sion of Acro­bat Con­nect, and panned it. It was unre­li­able, so using it with clients was too risky.

Since then Adobe has over­hauled the ser­vice, and it’s become quite use­ful when meet­ing with small groups for online demon­stra­tions or col­lab­o­ra­tion. I par­tic­u­larly like the fact that no IT staff or tech­ni­cal wiz­ards are required for this qual­ity of web conferencing.

High­lights

Adobe has done a nice job with the user inter­face, espe­cially things that influ­ence people’s expe­ri­ence — as either meet­ing host or participant:

• the qual­ity of what peo­ple see on-screen (visual fidelity) — see exam­ples below
• the over­all per­for­mance across the net­work (band­width management)
• the sim­plic­ity of what’s required to set up and run a meeting

While oth­ers may not care about Adobe’s atten­tion to details like on-screen ren­der­ing, it mat­ters to me. I find it dis­tract­ing to look at webi­nars when every let­ter or char­ac­ter dis­played on screen has fuzzy or ragged outlines.

When online meet­ings have to sub­sti­tute for the rich­ness of in-person inter­ac­tions, sub­tle things like font or object ren­der­ing can make a dif­fer­ence in people’s qual­ity per­cep­tions. (See below for actual image comparisons.)

I haven’t tried the audio con­fer­enc­ing ser­vice that com­ple­ments this offer­ing. (My clients gen­er­ally have their own con­fer­ence bridges, which we use instead of Adobe’s.)

And yes, there’s a more fully fea­tured “enter­prise ver­sion” of this hosted ser­vice for busi­nesses with much larger or more sophis­ti­cated web con­fer­enc­ing needs. The pric­ing model doesn’t work for a firm of my size, so I haven’t really tried Acro­bat Con­nect Pro, the more sophis­ti­cated version.

Pric­ing

The sub­scrip­tion pric­ing for the basic level of ser­vice is quite fair: $39.95/month or $395 for an annual subscription.

The basic web con­fer­enc­ing ser­vice offers unlim­ited online meet­ings with up to 15 par­tic­i­pants. There’s a pay-per-use option for those occa­sions when larger meet­ings are required.

A Sim­ple Comparison

Here’s a quick test I did today. The first screen­shot below shows a slide from a pre­sen­ta­tion I cre­ated with Apple’s Keynote, with the pro­gram oper­at­ing in play­back mode. (This is the best qual­ity impres­sion pos­si­ble.) This image has been scaled down from the actual screenshot.

Cap­tion: Screen­shot of slide pre­sented using Apple Keynote

The sec­ond image (below, also scaled down) shows what this pre­sen­ta­tion looks like when deliv­ered as a web con­fer­ence via Acro­bat Con­nect (minus the service’s UI).

Cap­tion: Screen­shot of slide pre­sented via Acro­bat Con­nect web con­fer­enc­ing ser­vice, as viewed on a meet­ing attendee’s screen (minus the Acro­bat Con­nect UI)

The host who deliv­ered this test webi­nar used a dif­fer­ent lap­top, so that the on-screen view­ing com­par­i­son took place on the same com­puter and monitor.

Clearly the image dis­played via the web con­fer­ence is phys­i­cally smaller, given the need for screen real estate ded­i­cated to Acro­bat Connect’s user inter­face (chat pan­els, attendee lists, etc.). How­ever, Adobe does offer some options for zoom­ing and scal­ing so meet­ing par­tic­i­pants can scale up the webinar’s con­tents to the size they prefer.

Well-designed slides or other imagery will look great when deliv­ered via Acro­bat Connect.

All in all, it’s now a pretty cool service.

And did I men­tion it sup­ports both Mac and Win­dows users, both for meet­ing host and par­tic­i­pant roles?