Adobe Connect Community

There is no limit to the number of meeting rooms that can be created through the Penn State Adobe Connect license. However, meeting room creation is limited to faculty and staff members with Meeting Creator licenses. Once created, all meeting rooms are available for use 24/7, whether they are scheduled or not. After a meeting room has been created, users can simply re-enter the room at any time to begin another meeting.

You will need to obtain a Meeting Creator license from your Adobe Connect Contact before you will be able to create a meeting room.

When creating a meeting room, there are only two required pieces of information: the meeting room name and the meeting room language. You may select to end the meeting creator wizard at any time after supplying these two pieces of information. All other settings are optional, and, except for the URL, can be edited at any time. After a meeting room is created, the URL cannot be changed.

Creating a Meeting Room for the First Time
(View the tutorial.)

After obtaining an Adobe Connect Meeting Creator license from your Adobe Connect Contact, follow these steps to create a meeting room for the first time:

1. Go to the Adobe Connect Central homepage interface on the Penn State Adobe Connect server: http://breeze.psu.edu

2. In the Create New: menu bar in the Adobe Connect Central homepage, click the "Meeting" button
Only faculty and staff who have been assigned an Adobe Connect Meeting Creator license will see this button. At any time after entering a name for the meeting, you can use the buttons at the bottom of the screen to navigate or quit the wizard.

New Meeting Button

3. Give the meeting a name and URL
On the “Enter Meeting Information” page, give the meeting a name and URL. In this example we are calling the meeting room “Weekly Staff Meeting” and assigning a custom URL of “WeeklyStaff.”

Custom URL's must be unique across the Penn State system. To reuse a custom URL you must first delete the meeting to which it is already assigned. If you don't specify a custom URL, Adobe Connect will assign a URL for you.

Enter Meeting Information Screen

4. Summary
Enter information about the meeting in the Summary text field. This information will be displayed in the "Overview" pane on your Connect Central homepage when you click the meeting name. For the Summary we have entered the description, “Weekly Adobe Connect staff meetings.”

5. Select the meeting start time and length
Next, select the meeting start time and duration. The meeting date and duration are displayed in the "Overview" pane on the homepages of participants whose names have been added to the Current Participants list. Once a meeting is created, it is available for use at any time, 24/7, whether a future start time has been entered or not.

6. Select a template for the meeting
Select a template for your meeting from the dropdown list. The template you choose will determine what the pre-configured layouts for the room will look like. In this example we are selecting the “default meeting” template.

Once a meeting room is created, layouts are easy to customize. New layouts can also be created from within the meeting room. Meeting rooms with customized layouts can be saved and used as templates for creating new meeting rooms in the future. (see Customizing Layouts under Using Adobe Connect).

7. Set the attendee "Access" option
Next, there are three options for granting access to the meeting room. The one you choose will depend on how you want to have people enter the room:

Meeting Room Access Options

If you select “Only registered users may enter the room (guest access is blocked)” you will need to add the names of all the Invitees to the "Current Participants" list. Attendees may not “knock” on the door to gain access to the room.

Note: Attendees "knock" on the door by trying to enter the meeting room. Inside the meeting room Hosts see a pop up message letting them know someone is asking for permission to enter the room.

When selecting the second choice “Only registered users and accepted guest may enter the room,” you will either need to add the names of all the Invitees to the "Current Participants" list, or you will need to have a Host present in the room to allow Attendees to enter as they “knock” on the door.

The third choice, allowing anyone who has the meeting room URL to enter the room, means that you can distribute the URL to all Invitees and they will be able to enter the meeting room just by clicking the link or by entering the URL in their browser. Their names won’t need to be added to the Current Participants list and a Host won’t have to be present in the meeting room to allow them to enter.

When choosing the third option, be sure to distribute the URL only to the people who should be in that meeting room. If uninvited guests are able to enter a meeting room, a Host must be present to remove them from the room.

Also note that when using the third option for setting up a meeting, the meeting is considered "open" and all content uploaded to pods in the meeting room is available for everyone to view through the Adobe Connect Central Search tool. The Search tool, located at the top of the Connect Central Web interface screen, searches across all open meetings for content relevant to the search term(s) and displays a list of all of the matching files.

8. Do NOT include audio conferencing
Finally, to complete setting up your meeting room information, select “Do not include any audio conferencing with this meeting.” Built-in Adobe phone conferencing is NOT an option at Penn State. If you would like to use the telephone for voice communication during your Adobe Connect meeting, please set up the conference call through the Penn State Call Center (http://css.its.psu.edu/callcenter/).

Do NOT Use the Adobe Connect Audio Conferencing Feature

9. To continue, click the “Next” button to move to the "Select Participants" screen
If you selected “Only registered users may enter the room (guest access is blocked)” or "Only registered users and accepted guests may enter the room" on the previous screen, you will probably want to add the names of all attendees to the "Current Participants" list. All users with valid Penn State Access Account IDs or Friends of Penn State IDs can be added to the "Current Participants" list. However, they must first log on to Adobe Connect to activate their account so their ID will appear in the column on the left, or, the meeting host must use the Penn State Bulk Upload utility to add their names to the Participant list. The Penn State Bulk Upload utility also allows a meeting host to add a list of names to the Participant list.

Participant List

Even if you selected to allow anyone with the URL to enter, you may still want to add selected individuals to the list so you can assign them specific roles in the meeting room.

To add an Invitee to the “Current Participants” list, select the name from the “Available Users and Groups” list on the left and click the “Add” button. If the name doesn’t appear in the list on the left, use the Penn State Bulk Upload utility to add the name to the Participant List.

For details on adding participants to the list and modifying their permissions, see Editing Participants under Creating/Editing Meetings.

10. After adding all necessary users to the “Current Participants” list, click the "Next" button to continue to the "Send Invitations" screen
The Send Invitations screen will allow you to notify participants of the meeting URL. Only the participants on your meeting "Participant List" will receive the message if you use this feature.

The “Send Invitations” screen looks different and has different choices depending on whether you selected “only registered users” "registered users and guests," or “anyone with the URL” as your access level when you created the meeting room.

In this example, we are using the invitation screen you will see if you are allowing only registered users to enter your meeting room, which is the more complex option of the three.

Send Invitations Screen

The Send Invitations screen will allow you to send the meeting URL to participants via email. From the participants you have added to your “Current Participant” list, you can further define who will receive invitations by selecting a specific group from the dropdown list.

The text displayed on the screen is the text that will be sent in the email message and can be edited to suit your needs.

We recommend that you change the URL at the bottom of the message to refer new users to information at the Penn State Web site, meeting.psu.edu/quickstart.

11. After sending the meeting invitations, click the "Finish" button to complete the creation of your meeting room and see the meeting room information screen where you will be able to enter the new meeting room.

The new room will also be added to the list of meeting rooms on your Connect Central Homepage as well as being added to the homepage meeting lists of everyone you added to the “Current Participants” list.