A love hate relationship with Adobe Connect.
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Connect
- Rearranging of room: When hosting a large presentation (of more than 300), the room can easily be converted into a customized-room or break-out session for example with ease.
- Preparation of Rooms: You are able to prepare a presentation before hand, where all questions can be created for a poll, notes are created for yourself, presentations uploaded and tested, and also a test of the sound. This helps to ensure that all facets are in working order and ready-to-go!
- Switch & Assigning of roles: It is very easy to switch between presenters, assign new presenters, upgrade viewers, and so forth.
- Multi-cam views: It is great that there can be multiple web-cams from presenters used at once. I believe the limit is 4, or at least this is the most that we have tried.
- Emailing of Chat transcript: You can easily send yourself a copy of the chat, which goes to the registered admin of the room.
- Upload of Presentations: There seems to be a problem with the uploading of PowerPoint presentations at times. This results in multiple test, converting into PDFs, changing it up for the best results. This is because there are times when the images are lost, slides are missing or other small things.
- Sound Issues: There have been instances where our out-of-house guest speaker has not been able to hear us (being the host). This resulted in a lot of typing back and forth between people. Also, there are times when there the is a lot of echoing in the room, so testing is absolutely recommended.
- Reporting on Attendees: There should be a way to ensure that all email address are collected to show to the host who attended. At times, participants use fake name, abbreviations, and so forth. So this means that it can be very time consuming to review at the end. Plus, we use Marketo for the follow-up activities and Adobe does not transmit the right statuses, so this requires a manual fix at times. More time being taken.
- New release of product features: It has taken a long time to get video recordings to be converted into MP4, which now can be done.
- Positive: Creation of Video Catalogue for existing customers.
- Helps customer retention through nurturing and providing of content that is easily catalogued.
- Positive: Links for sales & customer service.
- Rooms and layouts can be styled and cloned easily. This saves time and ensures that content is always available once it has been created. Definitely helps to add to the bottom line through the professionalism.
- Negative: Use of some PowerPoint presentations and LeadGen webinars.
- Some presentations fail and partially load for no apparent reason. Has meant that some webinars weren't as fluid as we liked and time lost to figure out the issues.
- Negative: API with Marketo.
- The syncing of information between AdobeConnect and Marketo is not entirely reliable. Of 100 leads, about 40 will synced, where the last 60 will have to be manually checked and converted. This means that a CSV file is pulled from Adobe and also from Marketo, where every signup is then cross verified manually. Extremely time consuming.
- Negative: Can't use KeyNotes.
- Means that some presentations have to be converted to ensure usage. Animations are lost and other design elements.
Engaging sessions:
If you are looking for an engaging session with loads of interactions and use of features. GoToMeeting/Webinar doesn't cut it as it lacks features, ClickMeeting is a great alternative, WebinarGeek can definitely hold up by is limited to the Dutch language for now.
Sales meeting with potential client:
GoToMeeting is our preferred choice as it is very easy to connect, conduct the presentation, and engage in conversation. The only drawback is that you have to download and install a program, where AdobeConnect is now turning to a cloud based system (was set for release when watching a release webinar).
Statistics and Customisation:
ClickMeeting is by far the most flexible in terms of providing statistics on users and production of a report on the event. It can also be tailored to be branded with a small fee.
Price:
WebinarGeeks is the tool that provides best value for money. The testing was a little more cumbersome due to my lack of Dutch; where a colleague had to help me a lot. ClickMeeting would be the second choice for price.