The Acrobat.com Blog

Your Ideas At Work

2009-11-06T19:38:57Z

Adobe Acrobat.com Ideas & BrightIdea are finalists in the Forrester Groundswell Awards. We're delighted on several levels. The Ideas site has contributed a lot of great ideas, inspiration and the site has helped us in setting priorities for the upcoming release of Acrobat.com. And, it's great to be voted a finalist for the Forrester Research award. The Acrobat.com Ideas site is powered by Brightidea's Webstorm technology.

]]> Specifically, Acrobat.com Ideas was recognized for embracing social technologies among a business-to-consumer audience. The award is based on the the concept, "Embracing the Groundswell," a phrase coined by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li. The groundswell, the wisdom of the crowd - all of this is about engaging customers with social technologies to help design products that are timely and responsive to real users' needs.

Our friends at BrightIdeas have been instrumental in making this site a success. We're excited to see the recognition for both companies.

And of course, we're looking forward to hearing more bright ideas from our users. Thanks for being part of what's next!

Saving Time, Saving Money - Government Style

2009-10-01T21:01:03Z

In a conversation with one of the Adobe staff in the UK, an inspiring although not surprising story was told. He works frequently with a number of departments in the UK Government, and knows quite well that it is typically a long process when updating any sort of policy or procedure, even for minor updates. And so, here's the story... and perhaps a good example for others who may find themselves in the same position.

]]> Our Adobe colleague works with a department of UK Government. This department provides standards and procedures for internal staff. They intimated that they wanted to rewrite their Acrobat usage guide for internal staff. In the UK, many departments use Acrobat extensively for providing documents, which can be viewed across almost any computer system, thanks to Acrobat Reader.

He suggested using Buzzword as a way to make creating and reviewing the document quicker and richer. The department contact created a document containing all the section headings. He then shared this outline document with 6 others on his staff. Their task was to create or update the content for each section assigned to them.

Once the document was content rich (first draft, if you will), the owner and team edited and updated the document. When they were satisfied with the content, he circulated it for a broader review with staff outside his group. He exported the document from Buzzword to PDF, and then uploaded the file to Acrobat.com for a shared review.

Buzzword + Acrobat.com + Acrobat = Success!

My understanding is that 3 weeks later, the document was signed off as complete and replaced the original guidelines. Pretty quick and painless - for any Government agency or really, for any large organization. Bravo.

Open Letter to Adobe Customers

2009-09-02T23:38:37Z

Adobe made some recent changes which resulted in a decline in customer service quality. We know that some of you have been impacted as you have contacted us via our forums, feedback email alias, and twitter. The product team is working hard to make sure your issues get resolved. We are responding to you directly and escalating your issues as necessary. We are also working closely with the support team to improve the quality of support you receive.

We wanted to share a letter from the VP of Customer Service, acknowledging and apologizing for the situation at hand.

Open Letter to Adobe Customers
Recently, however, our customers have experienced a level of service that is inconsistent with what they expect and deserve. This is unacceptable to us and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused some of our customers. We are working diligently - in fact, teams are working around the clock - to resolve these issues. I'd like to thank all our customers who are sharing feedback and giving us the opportunity to respond. We appreciate your loyalty, support and willingness to make your concerns heard.

]]> Adobe is in the process of transitioning to a new global service provider that will help grow and improve the quality of our customer service worldwide. While our new partner is a recognized leader in service and support solutions, this is a major global transition that includes bringing more than 800 new agents onboard. Clearly this process has not gone as smoothly as we had planned, and we are working to immediately remedy the situation. We are confident that once this transition is completed, we will provide customers with new and better ways to engage with Adobe using their preferred methods, helping to ensure prompt, effective customer service.

The Adobe Customer Care leadership team is monitoring our customers' experiences closely to understand and respond to the challenges you are encountering. If you experience difficulties of any kind, contacting Customer Service in your local region remains the best initial course of action; however, during this transition period, unresolved issues can also be directed to adbecare@adobe.com.

Regards,
Lambert Walsh
Vice President, Technical Services

Don't hesitate to reach out to us at acrobat.com_feedback@adobe.com if you have a concern. We are here for you.

The Acrobat.com Product Team .com.

Back to School with Buzzword, Part 1.

2009-08-21T15:26:08Z

As a student at City College in San Francisco over the summer, I used Buzzword to complete my class essays. I have to confess that it's a given that I would, since I'm also Community Manager for Acrobat.com. As many of us students will be returning to class in the coming weeks, I want to encourage you all to give Buzzword a try. What I found is that Buzzword so easy to use and elegant, it quite literally makes working on assignments more fun.

For instance, when approaching a topic, I have a jumbled buzz of ideas in my head that I want to capture, and translating the thoughts into a coherent report is easier with Buzzword. Buzzword's comment feature allows me to jump to the side of the current sentence to add a note to myself - a nice place holder to remind me to look up a fact or research an example - without interrupting the flow of the writing. Here's a screenshot of what I mean:

View image

After reading the rough draft, the comment feature also comes in handy for additional thoughts such as what I need to add, where it's best to add it, what I should consider deleting, and what I need to think about some more before committing it in my report. It's a much quicker - and also more tree friendly - process vs. printing out a copy and then hand writing comments.

]]> When it is time to print out the final copy, what you see in Buzzword is what you get on the printed page, which is not always the case with other word processors. And it's important when I'm running up against a deadline and the essay must be a certain length - I know exactly where I'm at on the page. Since the documents are stored online, I'll never have to use the "I'm sorry Professor, the dog ate my laptop!" excuse. As I move forward with school, I'll always have a record of any work completed using Buzzword... it may or may not be useful, but certainly nice to know it's there.

As Community Manager for Acrobat.com, I also hear from other students about how Buzzword improves their experiences. Varun Buxi, an MBA student, says: "Adobe Buzzword makes it easy to combine documents and get all the details right, then print the piece and hand it to the professor, complete with a high-quality layout. With Buzzword, I can produce better quality work." You can read more about why Varun loves Buzzword here.

On the flip side, I don't want to leave out the other part of the learning equation - teachers! In my next blog post, I'll explain Buzzword's collaboration features in detail, and why teachers are using this unique tool for improved classroom dynamics and interaction.

The Acrobat.com Team wants to talk to you.

2009-08-19T16:47:05Z

Do you provide professional services to clients or others outside your company?

If your work involves managing projects and exchanging files with clients or others outside your company, then you're invited to participate in a paid research interview. Documents you exchange may include contracts, legal documents, proposals, offer letters, marketing collateral, project plans, product documentation, and various kinds of agreements (e.g., financial, non-disclosure, etc.). You may work with consumers or businesses of any size. During each interview, participants will discuss the process for interacting with external parties and the kinds of documents that they exchange. Participants will also evaluate some new product ideas and provide their opinions about them. Interviews will be done individually, not in groups.

We expect this to be an interesting, low-stress opportunity to talk about how you do your work and help evaluate some product ideas.
Study details:
        Format: Phone or in-person conversation
        Compensation: $100
        When: 1.5 hours, Aug 24-31, 2009

If you are interested in participating, please click the link below and fill out our screener. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=kZDmO4Qlf5rKWD5tDwRKvw_3d_3d

**Participants will NOT be asked to disclose any confidential information.**

If the study is a good match, we will contact you by phone or email to schedule a time.

Thank you for your interest!
Acrobat.com Team

Hear how Acrobat.com can make you more competitive at work from the visionary behind the product. Webinar: Wed, 6/24, 12-1 pm PDT

2009-06-22T18:01:34Z

Meet Erik Larson the visionary leader behind Acrobat.com. We at Adobe have embraced Acrobat.com because it makes us more competitive and just makes work more enjoyable. Erik will share how Acrobat.com provides a fundamentally different and better way to work through stories and real-world examples. Come hear about the future of Acrobat.com and the vision behind the product. This will be an interactive session; Bring your questions and thoughts.

Details:
Date: Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Time: 12-1pm PDT
Meeting URL: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/comseminars

No registration required. Just click on the URL above or enter it into your browser. We'll open the room 15 minutes prior to the event.

Hello (Business) World - Welcome to a New Way to Work

2009-06-15T07:01:01Z

Today we take a big step towards realizing our vision of a new way to work on Acrobat.com.

Today we end the public beta for Acrobat.com. We launch Acrobat.com Premium subscriptions for more intensive business use (yes, the free version of the service is still available, and still free :-). And we give a look into the future of Acrobat.com for the coming year, starting with the unveiling of our spreadsheet product, Acrobat.com Tables, on our Labs website. Lots of news! Oh, plus two weeks ago we released Acrobat.com Presentations.

We're busy because our customers are busy.

]]> They are business people who solve business problems, set business directions, and manage business people. They are marketers, lawyers, program managers, general managers, CEOs. They work with others, in teams that often span multiple companies and multiple locations. And documents are the currency of their work, because documents establish shared understanding of what has happened, and what needs to happen next. Documents establish and communicate common goals. Documents are business.

Our product vision of a new way to work is based on three principles. First, bringing people to documents is more efficient and effective than sending attachments to overfull inboxes. Second, working together on documents in real time is more productive and convenient than working separately on multiple copies of multiple versions. Third, collaboration is much more about people than it is about technology, and so our products need to be simple, powerful, and fun to use.

We believe that Acrobat.com can make you more competitive, because we know it makes our team more competitive.

And we're just getting started.

If you are interested in a few more details, check out what's coming on labs.acrobat.com or flip through the presentation below to get a bit more background on how we've done in the first year since launch and what we're planning for the next:

Finally, as a thank-you to the 5 million people who signed up for the public beta and gave us so much great feedback, and everyone who comes by in the next month, we have a special promotion running until 16 July that gives you up to $50 off an annual subscription.

So definitely check out Acrobat.com Premium. We're open for business.

As always, you can let us know what you think we're missing on ideas.acrobat.com. And feel free to follow me on Twitter @erikdlarson for future updates.

Shared Tables for Shared Data - New on Acrobat.com Labs

2009-06-15T07:00:00Z

Announcing today - Tables on Acrobat.com Labs. Tables is the most recent addition to Acrobat.com, and joins Presentations and Buzzword. And it's pretty amazing, if we do say so ourselves. Check it out: http://labs.acrobat.com. And don't miss the Crash Course. You'll see what we mean when you open your first table.

]]> Tables tackles the most common use of spreadsheet - working with and sharing information such as project management task lists, budget planning, sales lead pipelines, contact lists and more. Tables has the familiar look and feel of a spreadsheet. It's optimized for the functions people do using table features in spreadsheets or in simple databases. In a nutshell, shared tables for shared data.

The key problem we spent a lot of time thinking about, designing, re-designing and thinking about some more is this: How do people really want to work together on a spreadsheet?

It's a tough problem, and there are some simple, elegant solutions included in Tables, which you'll see in action when you work as a team. The design anticipates how to help people work simultaneously, and how to keep the interactions 'polite' when more than one person is working on a worksheet.

• All users can add data simultaneously - solving one of the biggest problems with shared worksheets. All data is always up-to-date for everyone.
• Presence - lets you know who else is working on the table and where they are working
• Private and common views - allows the team to work together, but see the information that is important to each person. Private views let you see information that is important to you, without disturbing others working on the sheet.
• Filtering is real time so you can play with the data and adjust your filter in real time, without having to open a dialog box for every change.
• Sorting - quick, simple and always includes all of the data

Like Presentations, this Preview is on Labs - and clearly, there are more features we want to add. There are some obvious items which will be coming soon - export, print, and more tools for analyzing your data.

Take a look; send us feedback. We need to get back to work now...more good things to come.

Why our team can beat your team

2009-06-12T05:28:38Z

It's not that we are smarter or more creative. It's not because we like each other more. It's because we've found a new way to work.

We get more work done, much better than your team, in much less time, because we use Acrobat.com.

And from a personal standpoint, by working this way I get fewer emails and spend less time in meetings, yet I get more done, have more time to think, and enjoy my work and my co-workers more. How does that sound to you?

Let me give you a real world example of how this happens.

]]> Last month we had to create a positioning document, usually about 12-15 sentences that describe what our business is all about, with an eye on the coming year. This is a critical business document for a professional marketing organization. Who are our customers? How are we differentiated from the competition? What position do we want to establish in the market?

There were 10 people involved in the document from 3 cities across the United States, with people working from home and the office, with morning people and night owls. Some marketers, some public relations, some product people. Some senior executives, some individual contributors, all busy.

And we got it done extremely well. We got participation from and alignment across the team. In two weeks. All that with only 30 total emails (3 messages sent to 10 people), zero meetings, and zero email attachments. Thirty emails, zero meetings, zero attachments. Thirty-zero-zero. Great result. Done.

Sure, there were side conversations, some IM exchanges and phone calls here and there. But all the work was done in Buzzword, people working when they had time to think, with everyone having access to the same version and the same commentary, the whole time always on the same page.

How would this process work in a 'normal' organization?

First, there would be a meeting with 7 people who haven't thought about the problem very deeply. Once you find a time slot when everyone is free, of course. And in the course of that meeting you would realize that you forgot to include 2 people, and someone else couldn't make it. At least 3 other meetings like this would ensue over the course of two weeks, with more time wasted getting people up to speed and listening to people argue about something they could just work out on their own.

Looking at our final document in Buzzword's history feature, there were about 30 versions of the document in 2 weeks. So that is 30 versions times 10 people equals 300 emails with 300 copies of the document that would have been emailed around as attachments stuffed into overfull inboxes.

Also looking at the document, there were about 50 substantive comments, many of which were in response to other comments. So 50 comments times 10 people equals 500 emails that people would have sent around, assuming they had bothered to try to follow the threads of the discussion.

So 800 emails, 300 email attachments, at least 4 frustrating meetings. Eight hundred, three hundred, four versus 30-0-0. Plus a good result and an aligned team. Who wins? We do.

To be clear, this is a team of people who are building Acrobat.com and have been using the service together intensely for at least six months. In other words, it is a team of people who are both motivated and trained. But the results, clearly, speak for themselves.

This story also makes it clear to me that at the same time we are building Acrobat.com for you, we need to do more to help explain how to use the service to make your team more competitive, so you can innovate more, attract better people, make more money, and beat the competition.

So here is lesson #1. Next time you schedule a meeting where you are 'trying to get alignment,' do these 10 steps:

1) cancel the meeting...really, cancel it

2) spend a little time gathering your thoughts, write up a rough draft of your proposal in Buzzword, and share it with the other people who need to have input

3) remind people to review and comment on the document when you see or talk to them in person...you'll have time for this because you just canceled a meeting, remember?

4) check in on the document after a day, and if you don't understand or disagree with a comment, then call the person or stop by to talk in person...you'll have fewer emails, so plenty of time for this sort of 'nicety'

5) consolidate the comments and inputs into the document and add your own brief comments so others can understand what you did

6) once you have revised the document, send an email asking people to review it again and comment on the revised draft as needed...then maybe go for a short walk to clear your head

7) if you really must have a meeting to get agreement on a particularly contentious area, do it now, but only invite the opposing parties, and use video conferencing via ConnectNow if you aren't in the same room, to make it a little more personal

8) check in again to make sure everyone has looked at the document by mousing over the collaborator bar on the bottom of the document, then remind any stragglers to get on it

9) consolidate comments one last time

10) ask everyone to check the final document (again, email is ok for the reminder ;-), and declare it done

Now that the secret is out, maybe you have a fighting chance against us...but then again, I haven't told you how to make presentations better and faster, so our team can still beat your team...

We'll keep working hard to help you get more work done, more quickly, and with better results. Let us know what you think we're missing on ideas.acrobat.com. Feel free to follow me on Twitter @erikdlarson. Or check out my previous blog postings, if you're interested.

And yes, I'll share that positioning document with y'all. Soon. Just not quite yet. We're a competitive team, after all.

NEW! Presentations on Acrobat.com Labs

2009-05-27T05:08:52Z

Today we announced Acrobat.com Presentations, a new beta service on http://labs.acrobat.com. Imagine the beauty, power and collaboration of Buzzword, only for presentations. I think Anthony Ha at Venture Beat said it pretty well in the first blog posting we saw in the wild, “...there’s a solid core for Adobe to build around…genuinely beautiful…the key feature of Acrobat.com is the collaboration it allows…”

]]> But of course, the best thing to do is go check it out at http://labs.acrobat.com. We’re expecting a lot of interest, so if we’re busy, please check back. Or you can follow us on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/acrobatdotcom for updates throughout this launch and afterwards.

It's show time. Presentations from Adobe!

2009-05-26T21:01:42Z

You asked. We listened. Today, we're announcing Acrobat.com Presentations.

This is a Labs Preview of our latest application - Presentations. It's an exciting, new product and we want you to give it a spin!

Our new presentation tool joins Buzzword in the growing ranks of our online collaborative offerings. You can try the public beta version on our labs site (http://labs.acrobat.com). If you already have an Acrobat.com account, you can just sign in. Or, there's free sign up for new users.

]]> What's cool about it? It's collaborative - and in ways that will help make it really easy to work on presentations as a team. It's beautiful - an elegant user experience, tools where you need them, a great set of themes, smart color sets to make your presentations look good and much, much more. And, there's great visual effects you can do, since we're running in Adobe's Flash player - so your presentations will look very polished, with just a couple of clicks.

Acrobat.com Presentations is evenly balanced between working together and working apart. If you want to work on the same slide at the same time, go for it. On the other hand, if you and your colleagues are in different time zones, feel free to make your changes on your schedule.

Now, there is no need to search for the latest version or combine multiple copies in order to capture everyone's changes. Since everyone can work on the presentation, no one is locked out while others are making changes. Presentations also makes it easy to see who has access to the presentation, who is viewing, who is editing, even which slide each person is editing.

This Preview is on Labs because we live by the Web 2.0 dictum, "Ship Early, Ship Often." We want to share this first look at Presentations with our users so that we can get feedback and make sure we're on the right track. We have more features to add before we bring Presentations onto our Acrobat.com page. For example, we're not yet importing and exporting .ppt or .pptx files, but rest assured, the team is hard at work implementing that and more and will be releasing new features regularly. Let us know what you think - click on Send Us Feedback in the Presentations Help menu.

Adobe's Acrobat.com (and Presentations on Acrobat.com Labs) give you a new and elegant way to work together - on documents, on presentations, on web meetings....and there's more to come.

The Future of Work - good-bye martini lunches, hello working poolside

2009-05-14T23:28:05Z

Will social networking and instant messages replace the standard business phone call, the client lunch and the handshake? The Acrobat.com team recently completed a survey with Directions Research, Inc. that points toward an evolution in office workplace culture, including the changing ways white-collar workers are interacting and coordinating their tasks, and how business will be conducted in the social media-rich environment of the 21st century.

]]> The survey identified four key categories of knowledge workers:

Leaders - Young professionals who use a variety of emerging technologies both at work and in their personal lives
Actives - Largely over-35 year old professionals who have adapted to emerging technologies to meet the changing demands of the workplace
Followers - The less technically-inclined who rely on e-mail at the exclusion of other technologies
Resistors - Generally older workers who are reluctant to adjust to shifts in the workplace and office technologies

The research suggests several trends that we found interesting and that strongly support the vision we have for Acrobat.com:

* The leap in new technology options and the shifting demographics of the workforce mean that the old, traditional way of doing business is rapidly being enhanced by new ways of working. More business will be conducted using emerging communications technologies and social networking platforms.
* Technologies that people prefer to use in their private lives will become the technologies people want to use at work...what we call the consumerization of collaboration.
* The younger generation prefers to use multiple channels of communication, often choosing social networks, text messaging or instant messaging instead of e-mail and in-person meetings.

I believe this shift will lead to increased workplace support for technologies that offer these capabilities; I remember how painful it was to leave MIT as an email-savvy young go-getter in the early 90s and enter the Air Force where most people didn't even have access to desktop computers (yes, green-screen Wangs were the order of the day). I agitated heavily for more networked computer power, and got it by hook and by crook, at least for my immediate group...and by the time I left the Air Force in the late 90s, I was emailing my girlfriend from the Kuwaiti desert every day, as was just about everyone else. Now our military forces, and even Obama and Hilary, use Connect Pro to collaborate in real time with people around the world as a matter of course.

Other notable findings from the survey:

* While email is still the leading technology tool of choice, usage of text messaging, instant messaging, social networking and online productivity tools are on the rise with white-collar workers under 35, with nearly one in three reporting they use these technologies at work daily.
* 50 percent of technology "leaders" would choose text messaging or instant messaging if they could have only one technology for a month for personal use.
* In the next five years, white-collar workers plan to increase their time working remotely by 50 percent, resulting in average white-collar workers spending 30 percent of their time working out of the office.

Take a look at the results and see if there is anything else that strikes a nerve for you:

You can click the expander arrow on the top right to view the presentation at full screen, or 'Menu' to download the document. The survey was conducted by Directions Research via Internet in late February 2009. Roughly 90 percent of the respondents were white-collar-workers. College students account for 10 percent of the survey. Survey responses were divided equally between men and women.

As I was quoted in the press release, more or less: "E-mail was a major disruptor to the way people worked a generation ago, moving communication and collaboration into the digital realm. With new technologies providing an even more fluid and immediate means for communicating and creating information, we are poised to enter into the new era of work, where getting knowledge work done faster will be essential to the success of business."

Or as Randy Brooks, president and founder of Directions Research, said: "...businesses that support these new technologies and workflows will likely gain competitive advantage as they enable a new level of productivity among their workers." By the way, click through on Randy's name to check out the Directions Research website...what a great way to use the rich media on the web to sell a high-end service; have your employees talk about their work through candid and open video interviews.

Working together better and using the web to its fullest means better business results. Making that possible is what Acrobat.com is all about.

For past and future updates you can follow me on Twitter @erikdlarson.

Buzzword @ BU

2009-05-05T19:32:04Z

Fred Bayles, a Professor at Boston University School of Journalism, is a hard man to talk to. Not because he's unfriendly or isn't interested in talking, but he's got other priorities. During the semester, he's generally got a desk phone attached to one ear, a cell phone on the other and his fingers on a keyboard. At the other end of the phones and on his email are his students who are on Beacon Hill (Boston) staffing BU's Statehouse Program. They're reporters covering government and politics for a dozen local newspapers, websites, and radio stations around the state. And Bayles is their editor/teacher/mentor.

]]> So here's the scene before Buzzword: BU students are at the Statehouse in Boston. They're on laptops with wireless Internet access and standard desktop office software. Bayles is in his office juggling phones and keyboards and emails. Controlled chaos: with standard software, the reporters are emailing their stories to Bayles and their co-reporters, calling on the phones to alert their partners, checking email, detaching and attaching new versions, editing, and trying to keep track of it all.

Enter Buzzword: At the beginning of this semester I introduced Bayles and his students to Acrobat.com. We spent a morning playing with Buzzword, ConnectNow, and Share. So, there's still chaos, and they're still on the phones, but Buzzword's streamlined the collaboration. Now email is just a notification. No more attachments. No more hunting for the latest version. All the comments in one place, with version history documenting the changes.

Yesterday I went back to the class for a debrief. Mind you, we've not solved all their problems and I got some great feedback on improvements we need to make - for example, they need be able to strip comments from a document without deleting them one-by-one, or even better, export a "clean" document to MS Word for submission to their clients. They also want direct chat in the sharing bar, and a better document compare feature that tracks changes by writer. And the class had some very cool ideas for integrating Buzzword with some of the social media on the Web.

Nevertheless, the experiment was successful enough that Bayles plans to expand the use of Buzzword next year.

ConnectNow to the Rescue!

2009-04-29T20:50:27Z

I was one of those 6th grade nerds in the AV corps. We were the guys who got to run the projectors or show the filmstrips. We'd wheel the equipment around the school and feel quite important because we knew stuff the teachers didn't - like how to thread a 16mm projector or splice a film. But there was always a projector bulb or a fuse blown that would sabotage our efforts. And it seems like even today, even with our technology advances, there's always a glitch that gets in the way of our best-laid plans.

]]> Last week I spoke at the MIT Enterprise Forum. I'd spent considerable time preparing what I thought was a great set of slides, dumped them into a PDF for easy presentation purposes, and contacted the organizers to make sure I'd have a projector and screen.

Well, there was a projector, and there was a screen, and there was a complicated control panel (hey, it was MIT after all), but after 30 minutes of messing around, nobody could get the projector to come on. I really didn't want to give up on the slides as there was some visual data that supported my thesis - and I'd put in too much time on the presentation to give up.

The planners looked for help, looked for adjacent rooms with functioning projectors, and were at a complete block when I realized I had the solution at hand: I asked the audience to fire up their laptops, wrote my ConnectNow URL on the blackboard (MIT still has blackboards and real chalk!), and off we went. I shared my screen, members of the audience (with laptops) joined my meeting room, and all could now see the slides.There were enough laptops in the room that everyone could see a screen and I could support my talk with my visuals. Piece of cake.

So, keep an ConnectNow meeting room in your bag of tricks. Great answer to the "projector bulb" problem.

Feedback Matters: New Features in ConnectNow

2009-04-10T22:44:46Z

NEW FEATURES IN CONNECTNOW

We receive a lot of good suggestions for new features from our users on a daily basis through our ideas web site & our forum, and it's always very exciting when we get a chance to implement one of those ideas.

This week, we released a new version of ConnectNow and we were able to make the following two new features available to all of you:

Application / Window Screen Sharing
Requests for this feature from our users: Link to the idea on our ideas site & Link 1, Link2, Link3, Link4 on our forum.

]]> You can now choose to share a particular window or application instead of sharing your whole desktop when using the screen sharing feature.

This is very useful if you want to keep your e-mail and/or messenger application opened for example while sharing your screen but you are worried about notifications/messages being shown to everyone.

Sign Out
Requests for this feature from our users: this idea was submitted via e-mail a few times and on our forum.

You can now sign out when leaving your meeting room.

This option comes in handy if you have more than one ConnectNow account (1 professional and 1 personal for example) or if you are using a public computer (at the library for example) and want to make sure that your meeting will not be accessed by the next person using that computer.

MORE IMPROVEMENTS

Screen sharing quality

We improved the screen sharing performance in February by lowering the bandwidth consumption needed for screen sharing, we then realized that quality was not optimum anymore so this time around we worked on improving the quality without losing any of the performance improvements made 2 months ago. We hope that most of our users will see a difference and benefit from those improvements.

Documents containing text should be much easier to read now for meeting viewers.

Bug Fixes

We've also fixed about 50 bugs in all areas for this release.

FINALLY

Please continue to share your feedback with us via our ideas web site & our forum and we'll do our best to address your needs.

More new exciting features on the way; stay tuned.

Cheers,
Julien (QE) and the ConnectNow Team