Acrobat 8: Aerial Connection
As has been previously noted, the first significant fruits of Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia will be officially borne when Acrobat 8 begins shipping — early November, according to the latest company reports. The live Web conferencing application formerly known as Breeze, which I must say from experience was aptly named, is now dubbed Acrobat Connect and will be available as a hosted service. You can launch an “always-on” personal meeting room from within Acrobat or Reader and invite up to 15 people to participate.
Soon you’ll be able to test drive the functionality and judge the usefulness for yourselves, as Adobe will be offering a free trial version through the end of 2006. For one example of how a training company utilizes and benefits from Connect, read the case study on Promega Corporation [PDF: 412kb] available on Adobe.com.
You may not get the chance to test Connect in the same manner that Mark Szulc, a Senior Systems Engineer at Adobe, and colleague Andrew Spaulding did recently. So it’s worth reading Szulc’s blog post titled “That’s just damn cool–Acrobat Connect on a plane” for the details of their recent aerial connection. While Spaulding was in flight, he pinged hotel-bound Szulc and they linked up via a Connect personal meeting room to collaborate on an upcoming presentation. They “even fired up the webcams because we could,” Szulc says of the encounter, which took place while Spaulding was “sitting in his seat somewhere above Australia.”
Of course, if you don’t have access to an inflight wireless service, as Spaulding apparently did on Singapore Airlines, this experiment isn’t going to fly. But it’s interesting to see that the barrier to such real-world, real-time global collaboration is not the technology.
Connect may prove to be an equally appropriate product name.
November 2nd, 2006 at 8:33 am
[…] As noted in a previous blog post, the Acrobat Connect hosted service is available as a free trial through the end of the current calendar year. According to Adobe, the “commercial release of Connect, initially in English, is expected to be available in January 2007 for a subscription price of US$39 per month, or US$395 per year per personal meeting room.” […]