What’s new

Optimized screen use

Make conducting your meetings as smooth and seamless as possible with an intuitive interface. Adobe Connect 8 features automatic resizing and rescaling, so you’ll never lose onscreen real estate. Consolidated audio and visual controls let you fine-tune meeting experiences with the click of a button. (See Inside a meeting room .)

Drag-and-drop for easier navigation and management

Streamline managing meetings in progress and optimize participant experiences by easily adding and moving meeting elements. Change meeting attendee roles using simple drag-and-drop, and get more people involved by instantly granting attendees rights to video, audio, or screen-sharing with basic mouse-over controls. (See Managing attendees .)

Easily bring outside rich media directly to participants

Provide participants with engaging, impactful experiences and improve overall meeting quality by simply dragging and dropping multimedia from external sources. Bring in rich animation, graphics, and high-quality video directly to your Adobe Connect 8 session and play them in full resolution. (See Sharing content during a meeting .)

Centralize meeting management controls

Conveniently manage and display all your meeting preferences in a single place. Manage the look of meeting backgrounds, participant options, and settings such as screen share and webcam quality to enhance your meetings. (See Customize the Connect Central user interface .)

Smart audio and visual controls

Intuitive and prominent layout of audio and video controls simplifies adjusting the sights and sounds of your meetings from a single panel. Consolidated controls for audio and visual elements let you instantly manage how participants experience content. (See Audio in meetings and Video in meetings .)

Rich notes pod and enhanced whiteboard

Bring greater clarity and interactivity to your meetings with richer notes presented in bold, italics, or underline, or formatted with multiple colors and bullets. In addition, enhanced whiteboard features offer streamlined use and greater control over graphics. You can whiteboard on Microsoft PowerPoint slides, JPG and PNG images, PDF documents, while screen sharing, and even on video. (See Taking notes in a meeting and Share a whiteboard .)

Advanced chat

With more options for public and private chat, everyone can interact in exchanges tailored to their individual needs. Private chats are displayed in separate tabs, and you can change text color, making it easy to differentiate and manage multiple conversations. (See Chat in meetings .)

Enable greater accessibility with keyboard commands

The Adobe Connect 8 interface is navigable by keyboard, significantly improving accessibility to meetings for people with impaired motor skills vision. The interface works with screen-readers for vision impaired to help ensure that anyone can participate in collaborative and virtual learning sessions. (See Accessibility features .)

Adobe Connect 8 offers Adobe Connect Desktop, an optional application based on Adobe AIR that accelerates organizing meetings and recordings. (See Adobe Connect Desktop .)

Customize attendee names (Connect 8.2)

Customize the display names of attendees in the Attendees pod. Use options under Attendees Pod preferences to add custom information to display names. Add special characters, for example parentheses and hyphens, as delimiters between various parts of a display name.

You can also sort attendees within a group based on their customized display names. (See Customize attendee names ).

Intuitive meeting initiation and navigation

Invite attendees and host collaborative sessions instantly without extensive training or support from your IT department, sparing critical company resources. Launch meetings effortlessly from your desktop, or leverage seamless integration with Microsoft Outlook, Adobe Creative Suite 5, and other business applications. Save ongoing meetings as favorites, and store groups of participants for quick access.

Find archived recordings

Searchable recording archives let you find and save meetings you missed or simply want to review again. Archived recordings include meeting materials such as documents, charts, audio, and video that can be played back online or offline.

Manage meetings offline

Manage your meeting preferences offline and automatically update them the moment you connect online.

Integrate with third-party audio- and video-conferencing systems

Expand high-quality online meeting participation by integrating dedicated video and audio conferencing systems. With Adobe Connect 8, people can participate right from their desktops, maximizing the reach and minimizing the costs of web conferencing. (See Audio conferencing options .)

Create two-way universal voice

Let Adobe Connect 8 provide a bridge for your audio, so that users can communicate from their telephone or their computer's built-in microphone. The Universal Voice in Adobe Connect joins telephone conferencing systems with computer-based Voice over IP. (See Using universal voice .)

In-product notification (Connect 8.2)

Improve the notification experience for users by letting them receive multiple system maintenance notifications and account-based product notifications. As an administrator, you can configure user accounts to simultaneously receive account-based notifications and system-based maintenance notifications. When a user starts a meeting, the notifications are queued up on the Notifications panel. The user can close the notifications if the user wants to respond later. The user can also prevent the notifications from reappearing in a meeting. For more information, see Configure multiple product notifications .

Improve meeting security and management

Strengthen the security of your meetings with advanced meeting management controls. Use optional password protection to permit only invited users to join a meeting and lead individually controlled web sessions to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access. (See Invite attendees and grant or deny access .)

Optimize performance

Keep meetings moving along with automatic failure prevention. Adobe Connect 8 allows meetings to be moved seamlessly from failed or under-performing servers to high-performing servers without loss of service.

Integration with mobile devices

Extend the reach of your message and enhance staff productivity by letting them attend web meetings, webinars, and eLearning sessions on the go from mobile devices. Adobe Connect 8 works on mobile devices enabled with Adobe Flash and includes the Adobe Connect Desktop client for devices using Adobe AIR.

Support users across multiple computing environments

Deliver rich content to organizations using various operating systems and environments. With support for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Citrix XenApp6, and other environments, Adobe Connect 8 offers unmatched cross-platform collaboration.

Programming interfaces for greater extensibility

Use Adobe Connect 8 published web-service application programming interfaces (APIs) to programmatically control everything from user management and scheduling to authentication and search. To customize web conferencing capabilities for your organization's unique requirements, leverage the new Collaboration SDK in the Adobe Flex development environment—used by more than one million developers worldwide.

XMPP chat integration

Leverage existing investments in IM infrastructure to support XMPP-based multiuser chat in Adobe Connect 8.