A Practical Guide to Adobe Acrobat Connect 7.0

Copyright Notice

I have to start out by satisfying the lawyers: Acrobat Connect is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc. and all images, likenesses, and approximations of Acrobat Connect are © Adobe Systems, Inc., who reserve all rights thereunto.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes that you (or someone you love) has either an Adobe-hosted version of Adobe Acrobat Connect 7 (as I do where I work), or an Acrobat Connect server. It also assumes that you have a meeting room on it that you can fiddle with. Setting up meetings is a different topic, as only certain individuals on an Acrobat Connect 7 server can create new meetings.

Sometimes an Acrobat Administrator will set you up your very own personal meeting room, as I do for my users where I work. If they can do that for you, get them to. It is the best way to practice the lessons here.

First things first

There are a couple of very common-sense things you should know before starting down the Acrobat 7 path. One has to do with Acrobat specifically, noe has to do with presenting meetings in general.

1. DO NOT EVER share your computer screen with your audience unless you ABSOLUTELY have to!

I cannot stress this strongly enough.

Yes, there are times where sharing your computer screen with your audience is unavoidable—software demonstrations spring immediately to mind—but the vast majority of business communication involves sharing PowerPoint presentations with an audience. This is where Acrobat Connect 7 shines.

Q. So, Acrobat Connect guru, why shouldn’t I share my screen?
A. I’m very glad you asked. There are four really good reasons why:

1. It looks terrible.
   Your PowerPoint presentation may look fantastic to you, in your office, but depending on your participants’ computers and bandwidth, they may see a blurry, fuzzy, ill-rendered mess on the other end. So many things affect the end-product of screen-sharing. Your participants’ bandwidth. Your screen size. Your resolution. Also, any animations you worked so hard on in your PowerPoint presentation will not survive the transition into screen-sharing.
2. It is grossly inefficient.
   Every time the screen changes, Acrobat Connect 7 has to redraw the change on everybody’s computer—sending tons and tons of data down a relatively narrow pipe. Consequently, when you change slides, your participants may not change slides for several seconds (I’ve seen it take as long as 30 seconds in some larger meetings).
3. Your audience will see EXACTLY how prepared (or unprepared) you are.
   Nothing kills your audience’s confidence in you and the material you’re presenting quite like floundering around looking for your PowerPoint presentation, especially when you’re sharing your desktop at the time and everybody gets to watch you do it.
4. You’re letting your audience “backstage.”
   You wouldn’t let your client into your office if it were a mess. So why would you want to show your audience a desktop littered with a million icons here, there, and everywhere? And as harsh as this sounds, the only one who is interested in seeing your wallpaper of that picture of you standing on the beach at Waikiki is you.

Why Acrobat Connect?

For business communication and online meetings, Acrobat Connect 7 has a couple of very distinct advantages over other online meeting tools like GoToMeeting and Webex:

• Set up a meeting room days, weeks, or even months in advance.
• Acrobat Connect 7 was designed to share PowerPoint presentations naively from the ground up. Presentations retain the vast majority of their original animation.
• Have all your notes and preparation off-screen, yet still accessible to you in the meeting room, and viewable only by you—no matter if you’re presenting from your own PC or not.
• Meeting participants don’t need some fancy-schmancy, hard-to-install proprietary software to participate in your meeting. All they need is a web browser.

ACROBAT CONNECT 7 101: DO's and DONT's

2. Be Prepared

The next most important ingredient for a successful meeting, just below the quality of your content, is how prepared you are to deliver that content. If you throw your meeting together in five minutes, your meeting will look like it was thrown together in five minutes.

• Prepare your meeting space well in advance.
  One of Acrobat Connect 7 biggest strengths is that it allows you to upload various kinds content into your meeting space well ahead of time. Once uploaded and set-up, your meeting space will stay that way until you’re ready to present. Uploading your content in advance of the meeting is extremely attractive because:
  
     – You don’t have to fumble around looking for it come presentation time
     – You don’t necessarily have to present from your own PC
     – You can hand off the meeting to someone else and they can control shideshow from their PC too.
  
• Practice makes perfect
  Actors going up on stage have rehearsed their parts precisely. Why shouldn’t you? Run through your meeting at least once to make sure everything flows alright. Make sure you know where all the buttons are. And maybe even pull in a co-worker and solicit some feedback.