Adobe Connect is a web conferencing platform that enables users to create presentations, online training materials, and learning modules. The product is entirely Adobe Flash-based and has several add-ons for customizing its software to suit each users’ unique needs.
$50
per host/per month
MaestroConference
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
MaestroConference is a web conferencing platform with the capability to run small break-out sessions within the main group. It incorporates voting and social capabilities.
It is a great resource for evaluating, refining, and combining abilities and essential experiences in the growth of the sales team training; It is productive and lucrative in terms of distance knowledge transfer, and it reduces employee training financing and expenditures. I really like the ability to collaborate as a group on a huge research project even when we are not in the same country.
This is best suited for webinars where you want increase participant engagement. Maestroconference has helped us avoid the type of webinar where the presenter has no idea if people are listening and participants often lose interest and end up checking email. The interaction level can become extremely high leading to increased engagement, satisfaction and buy-in.
The number one strength of Maestro Conference is the ability for the host to create "break out" groups where members of the call can interact with each other in smaller groups as if they were in an in-person conference.
Another quality of Maestro Conference that I love is the fact that the host can then "weave in and out" of the different break out groups, listening in, providing support and getting feedback. It's an incredibly tool that Maestro offers.
Lastly I think Maestro Conference has excellent customer service.
The overall connection and lag sometimes are disruptive. This may not be due to the platform as a whole, connectivity, and strength of the signal is probably a factor but it can get glitchy sometimes.
More features for remote desktop options, whiteboarding, or screen sharing to actively resolve issues would be great while collaborating.
Online support or forums to help assist with issues aren't as prevalent as you think they'd be. More individual resources to assist with issues would be helpful.
The call sound quality was often pretty poor, and we had a lot of trouble with calls being dropped. Over the years I would periodically throw in the towel and go back to Free Conferencing just to have reliable quality. But they only have 3 of 4 breakout rooms and I couldn't conduct the rooms easily. Then I try MC again to see if the engineering had improved. It was like a wave. Sometimes better, sometimes worse.
The conductor interface has an annoying glitch wherein we could not change a persons attribute fields on the fly. I would interview my callers and assign them to one class or another based on their answers, and the partner up people into breakout rooms based on their answers. This meant editing the two attribute fields , and it just plain didn't work 75% of the time.
Maestro Conference repositioned its business away from small educators like me, to large organizations like political action committees. The price became too high for me, and it just no longer made sense. I repositioned my product to work with less expensive and less complicated solutions.
The add on features, like recording each conference room, were insanely expensive.
VOIP and MC didn't mix. The MC dialer never worked. Neither did Skype. This meant that my international callers were out of luck. This was FRUSTRATING to say the least. Now I just use Skype. A picture is worth a thousand words.
The longer you use Adobe Connect, the longer you are likely to use it. Because you can build more and more resources over time, creating rooms that you re-use, recorded content you can repurpose, and tools that form the basis of ever increasing productivity, the more you use Connect, the more productive you become. Unlike competing products where, with every meeting you essentially start over -- setting up your resources for each meeting -- in my Connect rooms, I have highly tuned tools to accomplish my knowledge transfer goals. When I want to conduct another session - I send a link out to the appropriate room and instantly we are all focusing on getting a job done together. This ability of Adobe Connect to make you productive at an ever quickening rate is a competitive advantage
we have found no other company with the technology that allows us to conduct webinars with this level of interactivity. We've also been watching as the company has added on addtional functionality and are very please with how it is developing.
As sophisticated a product as Adobe Connect, the ease of use is outstanding. In my experience, even a user with very little knowledge of Adobe Connect can begin using and even leading sessions with very little training to get started with the basic features. Additional training is needed to become comfortable with the number of available features, but learning curve even for those is no steeper than would normally be expected from similar software.
The customer support of Adobe connect is professional and well-skilled for resolving our minor and major issues. Moreover, it has almost all the features that will provide you a secure connection, with people across the world. Education institutes can also implement this software. On the basis of its quality and technology, I will surely advise you to try it once.
The ability to have most of the functionality of a full LMS at a fraction of the cost is huge. I can create manage and deploy both synchronous and asynchronous training based on the situation and all of my training is tracked through a series of easily created reports
Prices do not seem to vary much among resellers of the Adobe Connect hosted license; the only price variation you're likely to find are among the audio providers. When implementing, you may also wish to look into expanding the amount of storage you are allowed on the server to avoid any problems later on as your library of files starts to build up
Actually, it was the other way around....we were using Adobe Connect, company-wide, then switched over to Zoom, mostly, I think, as a cost-cutting measure. But some Learning & Development folks campaigned to be allowed to retain some Adobe Connect licenses (for example, one L&D area had literally over 250 room layouts that their course facilitators could just jump into and use to deliver a course on short notice), which also allows some of us to continue to publish Presenter and Captivate modules to the Adobe server. (But, even those of us who still have Adobe Connect licenses use Zoom for most regular business meetings.)
Maestro Conference is the only service I know that allows you to create break out groups and allow participants to actively engage with each other and with the host. It is the most like an "in-person" event of any service I have used. And the customer service has always been excellent
Save on time - our instructors and people that use the platform can teach more classes and more often than in-person training and time traveling.
We cut down on spending. When we offer training using Connect - we do not have to spend on meals, hard copy materials, and reserving a venue to deliver training.
We increase our training sales significantly but offering Connect as an alternative - any unforeseen cancellations to a public class can result in transferring to a remote online Connected class.
When the monthly call with breakout rooms was working well I had a lot of good conversion. When it was not, because of sound quality of dropped calls, I was giving people a poor experience. Since I was using MC as the centerpiece of my TRIAL calls, it was a two edged sword.
