Adobe Connect Community

The members of the Penn State Adobe Connect team are located in a number of different buildings throughout the University Park campus. For example, it takes twenty to thirty minutes each way to walk, ride the bus, or drive between Rider Building II downtown and the Computer Building to attend a large group meeting. As the team members learned to use Adobe Connect and became more comfortable with it, we found it just as easy to set up an Adobe Connect meeting room where we could gather, saving on a lot of travel time.

Typically, four or five people are present in the Rider II conference room and two or three people at various other locations are present in the Adobe Connect meeting room, which is projected on the screen in the conference room. All Adobe Connect participants are given Host permissions so they can broadcast their audio and video as well as access all of the tools in the meeting room. Assigning everyone Host permissions is acceptable in this situation, where everyone is a trusted member of the team and knows how to use Adobe Connect. However, doing so could be risky in other situations. Remember that a Host has control of all of the tools in the meeting room and can therefore “hijack” the meeting room—either accidentally or on purpose.

We use a unidirectional Blue Snowball microphone so that everyone in the conference room can speak and be heard by participants in the Adobe Connect meeting room. Team members gathered in the conference room hear the participants in the Adobe Connect room speaking through the speakers on the project leader's computer.

We have also used a conference phone instead of the internal Adobe Connect meeting voice-over-IP broadcast. This is the best method to use if at least one person in the meeting is connecting via dial-up, if several people might be talking at the same time, or if application sharing in the Adobe Connect room is the most important aspect of the meeting. In addition to providing consistent quality, using a conference phone saves bandwidth so the Adobe Connect meeting room runs more smoothly with fewer performance issues.

Our Adobe Connect meeting room layout typically contains the Camera and Voice pod, a Share pod, the Attendee pod, a Chat pod, and a Note pod. We use the Note pod for taking meeting notes that can be copied and pasted into an e-mail message after the meeting and sent to the group, including people who may have missed the meeting. We do not usually record our meetings; it is easier and quicker to distribute the notes and have people make additional comments through e-mail.

Typical Adobe Connect Team Meeting Room Layout

We include the Chat pod as an alternate means of communication.

We use the Share pod to share applications and windows to demonstrate work in progress (such as user interfaces the programmers are creating) and to review and update tasks in our project management application.

The project leader is responsible for scheduling the meeting, creating the Adobe Connect meeting room, arranging for the meeting audio—using either a phone connections or unidirectional microphone—and e-mailing the Adobe Connect meeting room URL to attendees. The project leader also reserves the conference room and comes to the meetings five minutes early to set up the computer, make phone connections if necessary, and turn on the computer projector.