Connect Pro Getting An Upgrade

I just got notified that Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro version 7 is about to get an upgrade (labeled Service Pack 1). Customers who have the software installed on premise should get the service pack on November 3 and customers who use the online hosted service should see the upgrade after November 7.

There are supposedly some bug fixes included (the release guide is not yet available online) and a variety of feature improvements:

1. You can use keyboard arrow keys to navigate menus inside a meeting room
2. You can use keyboard shortcuts to control key meeting functions
3. You can cycle through pods and options with the tab key
4. You can set a custom color to highlight pods in a meeting room

   (These are obviously aimed at helping limited accessibility users who can't use a mouse)

5. Russian and Turkish have been added as language options
6. New and expanded reporting options that let you construct custom reports
7. Overage options for meeting rooms

That last one is the most interesting to me. If you have an account with a maximum meeting room size of 100 people, the minute you hit 100 participants, nobody else can join. The new option lets you pre-purchase blocks of minutes that get drawn on as needed to expand capacity.

Say you buy 5000 overage minutes and put them in your "bank." You run an event and max out your 100-person capacity. You can let additional people join against your banked minutes. The usage is calculated by the amount of time each extra person stays in the meeting. So if one extra attendee participates for 60 minutes, and another extra attendee participates for 45 minutes, you are charged 105 minutes against your bank.

Some of the details are unclear to me... Can an organizer control which meetings allow over-capacity attendance and which don't? What happens if you use up your banked overage minutes in the middle of a webinar? Do all the extra attendees suddenly get booted out of the meeting?

I'm glad to see that Adobe is still making upgrades to their Breeze purchase. It shows that they didn't simply write off the product as an uninteresting part of the Macromedia acquisition. I'm looking forward to seeing what bug fixes get included in this release. I have a few pet priorities, along with some minor usability enhancements that I'm crossing my fingers might have been added without being called out in the advance announcement.

 

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