Good for meetings, GREAT for virtual training!
September 19, 2019
Good for meetings, GREAT for virtual training!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Connect
Until last year, Adobe Connect was used as my company's meeting and virtual instructor-led training platform across the whole organization. We also used our area of the Adobe server to publish some of our e-learning modules created in Adobe Presenter or Captivate. Now, my company has switched to another tool (Zoom) and only a few people have retained our Adobe Connect licenses, primarily for training purposes (or for more complex meetings).
- 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.
- No virtual background option
- Without multiple screens, you can't really see the room while you're screen sharing, making it harder (but not impossible) to monitor chat, and, I think, not possible to see others' webcams.
- No "call me" feature.
- Very expensive!
- I don't know how to answer this....I don't think my area has ever measured this (or even how we'd have gone about measuring it).
- Zoom
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.)