multimediacollege, Adobe Authorized Training Centre

Adobe Connect is a compelling platform for hosting and attending online meetings, trainings, virtual trainingrooms and much more; and the cool thing it’s Flash based. Some tips and tricks to help upgrade the user experience – without having to look for a network engineer! The more bandwidth, the better for each attendee and the presenter. Saving bandwidth helps improving User Experience…

Do you need more bandwidth?

How to check if you need these tips? In the meeting room, go to the top right-hand corner and click on the green rectangle.

You’ll see your connection speed, latency… nice to know the details!

Things you can do as a host.

1) Upload your presentation before you start the meeting. Especially powerpoint files…

Worst thing to do: Share your screen, open Powerpoint and let everyone see that show.

The screensharing option in Connect is the biggest BW resource-hog.

2) Check your meeting room connectivity options. You could lower the connectivity to DSL/Cable if you’re organizing a small meeting without a lot of bells & whistles.

3) Take the “Attendee” pod out of the presenter area and put it on your presenter space. The ‘attendee’ pod is a little BW hog, something you might not be aware of.

Things you can tell your attendees to do:

1) Check the meeting room connectivity options: Are you on LAN speed? Or is DSL/Cable enough?

Other Recommendations

• Close non-essential applications running on your machine — especially programs like e-mail applications that automatically check for new mail at set intervals
• Only allow presenters to broadcast audio or video. Others shouldn’t be able to broadcast it it is not needed for the meeting.
• Use a telephone (conf call) instead of Adobe Connect’s audio if possible.
• Freeze your web cam image, or set it to “Slow Images”
• Record the meeting. Users can play the recording later at whatever size they would like. All the interactivity is not lost, users can interact with recorded material.
• If you simply want to share a powerpoint presentation, upload the ppt to the server (so it gets transformed into a swf). The worst here is to share your screen, open PowerPoint and present your slides.

Don’t you get any audio or video?

Ports & Firewalls can throw in a problem.

There is  a nice port check available here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/164/tn_16466.html

The test  determines which ports the Adobe Flash Player is able to connect through to the Flash Media Server located at Adobe.com.

If you still have an issue, let us know we’re happy to help.