Adobe Connect vs MURAL (formerly Mural.ly)

• Ability to set up multiple room layouts that "persist" indefinitely. This allows you to set up your room layout as far ahead of time as you'd like and/or re-use layouts over and over again.
• Access to a wealth of add-ons (like clocks, timers, interactive word clouds, random participant selector, etc.), many of which are free.
• A good variety of "pod" types -- different types of surveys, file shares, Q&A, whiteboard (with ability for participants to annotate), etc.
• Multiple ways you can share your screen -- share your whole desktop, share just selected windows, or share just selected applications.
• Ability to have multiple hosts for a meeting and to easily promote a participant to the Presenter or Host role on the fly.
• Breakout rooms, ability to record meetings with options for computer and/or phone audio (including the ability link in external phone conference lines), engagement meters (which, I'll admit, I haven't really used), and, I think, pretty much all of the features that most similar platforms offer.
• Ability to pause webcam, rather than having to stop it and restart it (and, when paused, it shows the last image it was displaying before you paused it).
• For meeting recordings published to the Adobe server, provides a left-hand navigation pane that allows the viewer to jump to different parts of the recording, like each time the layout changes or to the point at which someone typed a particular chat message.
• Ability to email the contents of the chat pods to yourself, both as a host and as a participant.

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• It allows you to build from independent work to group exercises and discussions and using brainstorming and the voting tool to drive decision making and action.
• It has functionality that allows you to bring your audience to different areas of the whiteboard using the 'summon everyone' function, and move between delivering material with 'presentation mode' and interactive exercises where students contribute ideas or suggestions.
• It offers an interactive and engaging platform for collaboration and costs can be kept low because people can join sessions as visitors.

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• There are some connectivity drops. This results in users having to log out and log back in. that generally solves it but multiple instances can lead to frustration.
• A smoother interface would be a nice enhancement. maybe some of the windows could be hidden and brought up as hover over windows.
• The backend CMS is easy enough to manage after you have worked in it for a while but there are a lot of root folders depending on your setup and it can be slightly clunky to navigate to where all your materials and content is.

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• People accidentally type over their own content.
• Doesn’t work on phones/tablets.
• Without guidance, participants will type over others notes.

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• Provided a convenient space to bring people together for training and saved on resources to orchestrate training at a physical location.
• Disappointed with flexibility and adaptability for use with different platforms such as iPhone, Android, etc.
• Flexible pricing. There are cheaper options out there which is why I am currently exploring other tools for training.
• Not as user friendly as I would like to figure out permissions, etc.
• Availability of recordings for download for additional use is time consuming and inconvenient. To download, you need to replay the entire recording.

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• I have been able to continue my facilitation work.
• It has improved my profile as a tech-savvy facilitator.
• We have been able to have more efficient meetings.

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