By Jeff Baker

HighRoad Solution offers 7 different Web conferencing/ Webinar services, making sure that we can meet your varied conferencing needs. One of the most popular services is Flash based, VMX-Pro, otherwise known as Adobe Connect. Below are a few of the highlights of the new service. If you have any questions about it, would like to see a demo, or just talk about how it may be able to meet your webinar needs, please feel free to contact us.

Key Benefits of Adobe Connect 8 – VMX Pro

Easier to use

A primary focus of Adobe Connect 8 is usability. With a new simplified interface featuring enhanced layouts and better organized controls, accessibility functions, and one-click sharing, Adobe Connect is now more powerful and easier to use. New usability features include:

• Simplified user experience. Use Adobe Connect more intuitively. With the new user interface, you can easily discover all available functions and features through better organization and prominent display of the most important and frequently used controls and capabilities.
• Enhanced audio and video controls. Access audio and video controls centrally. Audio and video controls are prominently displayed and logically organized at the top of the meeting bar. All related capabilities are now centralized and easily accessible directly from each control.
• Unified attendee management. Access all participant management functions from the Attendee pod. Hosts can change participant roles using simple drag and drop and assign video, audio, or screen-sharing rights using mouse-over controls. Presenters can quickly get the vote count using the new status view and easily control breakout sessions using the new breakout view.
• Optimized screen use. Size your screen area for your optimum viewing. The meeting interface rescales intelligently to provide optimum viewing experiences for any screen size or resolution. Presenters can now size their own version of the presenter-only area individually without impacting the view of other presenters.
• Improved accessibility. Navigate the Connect 8 interface by completely via keyboard. Several hot keys are also supported for direct access to important functions and capabilities. Significant improvements in screen reader compatibility include JAWS and Win-Eyes support and accurate focus-location tracking by screen magnification software.

Better collaboration

To collaborate effectively, dispersed teams need to be able to share ideas and communicate freely, as well as capture decisions and results. With Adobe Connect 8, collaboration capabilities are now more flexible and robust, enabling teams to drive better results. New collaboration features include:

• Advanced chat. Organize chat into separate tabs for public and private conversations and reduce errant chat messages. Participants can choose the color and text size of their chat messages. Hosts can control whether private chats are allowed in a meeting room.
• Rich Notes pod. Use rich formatting capabilities in the Notes pod, such as bold, italics, multiple colors, and bullets. The Notes pod also includes productivity and accessibility improvements like support for keyboard shortcuts. Hosts can save notes as an RTF file on their local drive and then e-mail them to multiple participants directly from the Notes pod interface.
• Simplified Q&A pod. Easily manage questions between multiple Presenters during meetings. Presenters now have their own view for managing and answering questions and can assign/reassign questions, see who is answering, or answer the question privately or publicly. Participants have a separate view to ask questions and see answers.
• Enhanced Whiteboard. Collaborate more effectively with enhanced Whiteboard tools. In addition to the standard shapes available, you can create custom shapes and add text to shapes with just a simple double click. The whiteboard can also be used in the overlay mode on top of a shared document to zoom and pan along with the document.

Featured enhancements:

• New layout bar to easily manage and switch between meeting layouts
• Presenter Only Area Q&A pod
• Support for playback of H264 video
• Ability to create screen-sharing black list