Learn about the latest offerings in Adobe Connect. This article summarizes the new features and enhancements.
Adobe Connect enables you to create state-of-the-art digital training, webinar, and collaboration experiences. For an overview of Adobe Connect, see www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html.
The sections below summarize the new features and enhancements available in the various releases of Adobe Connect.
Adobe Connect has been known for the extensibility and customizability of the in-room experience, by enabling customers and partners to develop and use Custom Pods of their choice. So far, customers have had to visit this Adobe Connect - Apps and Integrations page to find the pods listed there, download them and then share it within a Share Pod inside the room. And whenever a developer ships a new version of the pod, they have to do repeat this process.
With the 12.9 release, hosts will be able to discover custom pods that are free to use, right within the room and instantiate them just as they would add a new instance of other native pods. Moreover, when a new version of a custom pod becomes available, the hosts will see an indicator that an update is available, and they can update it right within the room. Account administrators will have the ability to enable this discovery of custom pods within a room and also control which custom pods can be installed by hosts in a room.
The Help Assistant is an AI-powered conversational interface designed to help hosts easily find answers to their Adobe Connect questions. It utilizes the publicly available Adobe Connect Help Guide and Knowledge Base articles to provide responses, assisting hosts in accessing information on various tools and workflows in Adobe Connect. The Help Assistant can be accessed from the menu bar inside the room.
The Connect 12.9 release introduces the Room Search tool, designed to help hosts quickly locate actions, permissions, and preferences within Adobe Connect rooms. By selecting a search result, the corresponding menu or dialog will open. You can access the search using the keyboard shortcut Alt + Q (Opt + Q on macOS).
The Share Pod has been enhanced to proactively alert users to the discrepancies in their content post conversion/upload into the Share pod, with workaround suggestions where possible. This will help address any issues and their workarounds upfront.
In this release, we have focused on building an extensible framework to alert hosts to the issues in the content they upload. We have also implemented alerts for some of the key issues where PowerPoint content is not converted accurately and a common issue observed with MP4 videos (high bit rate). The precise set of content alerts we have implemented will evolve over time, depending on issues that we are able to address by accurate conversion or new issues that we may be able to detect.
Here is a list of issues that we will be able to detect and warn customers about in the 12.9 release:
The Connect 12.9 Release introduces a new drill-down report called Participant Profile, which Is a dynamic report that is displayed in a separate page detailing all the activities of a specific participant who attended a webinar.
This drill down report for a specific participant, is launched when a user clicks on a specific participant in the Activity tab of the Engagement Dashboard illustrated below.
Upon clicking a specific participant in the activity tab of the Engagement Dashboard, the Participant Profile opens in a separate browser tab, as illustrated in the following two screenshots.
The first screenshot presents a view of the engagement across all webinars attended by the selected participant. The first widget displays a summary of metrics including the total number of webinars registered for, the total number that were attended live and viewed on demand, the average duration of attendance and average engagement score. Following this widget, a list of events attended by the participant is displayed. By clicking on a specific event, the user will be able to drill down and view the activity details specific to that webinar in the Individual Event tab. Below the list of the events attended, the Q&A activity and Poll activity of the participant across all events are displayed.
The second screenshot presents a snapshot of the participant’s activities within a webinar. The topmost widget displays key metadata of the specific event like name of the event and date, along with participant-specific details including date of registration, duration of attendance for the live event and the engagement score for the participant. The next widget provides a quick glimpse of the engagement metrics for the participant. This is followed by the Activity Monitor widget which displays details like questions asked by the participant (along with answers if provided by the webinar team), how the participant responded to various polls, any resource that the participant downloaded, web links clicked, the chat messages posted by the participant and the various reactions expressed during the webinar.
The user can also download the Participant Profile report in PDF format.
A new add-in for Microsoft Outlook will allow hosts to easily schedule meetings using their Adobe Connect rooms from Microsoft Outlook. The add-in will have the following functionalities:
The add-in can be accessed at this link: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/office/WA200008090?tab=Overview
The Adobe Connect mobile app version 3.9 includes several improvements:
Users will see a revamped welcome page with two options – Sign in or Join session with link.
Users will be able to sign in to their Adobe Connect accounts by providing their Organization Adobe Connect account URL and email/ password. SSO is also supported.
A signed in user will be able to view their recently attended rooms across any surface (desktop app, browser, mobile app) on the homepage. They will be able to connect their MS 365 calendar, and also save their preferences.
The Adobe Connect 12.8 release expands access to the analytics dashboard to every license type (hosted only), adds improvements to the event analytics dashboard, introduces more expressive and animated reactions, adds support for popping out video cells from the video pod, improves the discovery of breakout rooms, enhances pod switcher experience, includes user experience and accessibility improvements, and fixes for various issues
Building on the base of the event analytics dashboard introduced in 12.7, the Session Analytics Dashboard will be available to users of all license types with meeting rooms, training rooms, and seminar rooms. The dashboard will provide a consolidated view of participant activities, interactions, and engagement during the session. The dashboard will also allow hosts to download various reports without having to enter the room after the session. The dashboard can be accessed by navigating to the By Sessions sub-section of the Reports section for rooms.
The existing Event Analytics Dashboard that was launched with Adobe Connect 12.7, will have multiple improvements including:
Detailed quiz report in the event analytics dashboard
Raise hand has been delinked from the actions and requests have been removed. Existing graphics have been replaced with more expressive emojis. The new set of reactions available are: Like, Laugh, Love, Applause, Surprise, Agree, and Disagree.
Behavior of Raise Hand:
Behavior of Reactions (other than Agree and Disagree):
Behavior of Agree and Disagree:
Behavior while Screen Sharing
Menu Preferences
Hosts view of Raise Hand dropdown
Hosts view of updated list of reactions
A host will be able to pop out individual video cells from the video pod, up to a maximum of two video cells.
Behavior of popped-out video cell:
Popping out a video cell
Popped-out video cell
Hosts will be able to switch between different attendee pod views without going into the attendee pod menu. This will improve the discoverability of the breakout room feature. Attendees (including presenters and participants) can also switch between the list view and status view from the attendee pod without navigating to the pod menu.
Breakout room transition
When the host starts the breakout, attendees will see a 6 second timer along with a message indicating that breakouts are about to be started. Attendees will be assigned respective breakout at the end of the 6 second timer.
When the host ends a breakout, attendees will see a 6 second timer in the breakouts bar on top. Attendees will be moved to the main room once the 6 second timer ends.
Breakout room transition while starting breakouts
Breakout room transition while ending breakouts
Main Room
To improve the experience of switching pods, the pod switcher will now have a heading “Switch Pod Instance”.
The copy of the “Add new PodName” has been replaced with “+ New PodName pod”, where PodName stands for the type of pod. For example, in a Notes pod, the host will see + New Notes Pod. Pods that cannot be added to the layout (if they are already in the layout or in the backstage), will appear in gray at the bottom of the switcher.
Pod switcher in main room
Breakout Room
In the breakout room, the pod switcher will now have the heading “Switch Pod Instance”, like the main room pod switcher.
The copy of the “Add new PodName” has been replaced with “+ New PodName pod”, where PodName stands for the type of pod.
Additionally, Main Room pods and Breakout Room pods will be separated by sections.
Pod switcher in breakout room
If a host would like to edit an Adobe Connect recording in an external application and replace the recording link, they can now navigate to the list of rooms and access the Replace Recording action. The host can select an MP4 file from their computer to upload, and the same file will act as an edited recording post upload.
Behavior of uploaded recording:
Updated dropdown with Replace Recording action with each recording.
Replace recording modal
) to indicate the quality of the available network connection. It depicts the meeting room connectivity status.
icon against their name. The components required to display the shared HTML content automatically downloads. Participants are able to view the shared HTML content in some time. The automatic download of the required components is a one-time activity that happens without any intervention required by the user. Similarly, Adobe Connect automatically downloads the required components when a user attempts to view, for the first time, a VC recording with HTML content shared in it.