Unless you’ve been living in a cave on a deserted island somewhere, you probably know that Steve Jobs at Apple is not too pleased with the folks at Adobe and their approach to Flash and its performance on the Mac. More importantly, he is so critical of Adobe Flash that he will not allow Flash on the Iphone, Ipod Touch and the soon to be released Ipad. I’m going to leave the corporate positioning and name calling to the professionals and stay very clear of this debate. Yes, I know, I’m sure they are all relieved to know that I’ll be taking a neutral position.
Rather than focus on what one company could do better or how another company could be more accommodating, I would like to highlight something that I’ve recently started using that is quite useful. It’s the new Iphone App from Adobe for Acrobat Connect Pro 7.5. Watch this video>
Despite the fact that Connect Pro delivers online meetings via the F-word (Flash for those of you not paying attention), Adobe has designed an elegant little app that allows mobile participants to attend Acrobat Connect Pro meetings using just their Iphone and a data plan. The app is just for participants and does not currently allow for meeting host controls, but it has a nice clean interface and is quite fast for those users out there that need to attend meetings on the go.
I have worked in the online Collaboration or “webconferencing” space for going on eleven years now. I’ve seen quite a few attempts by various companies to develop the holy grail of mobile webconferencing applications over the years only to deliver average results and moderate functionality. So, with that in mind, I downloaded the new Acrobat Connect Pro Iphone app with great skepticism.
To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. I was able to install the app in seconds. I logged into a team meeting and was able to follow along with the presentation quite easily. I expected there to be latency, but was excited that I was able to see new slides as they were presented within seconds of the changes being pushed by the presenter. In fact, I was in my office and was watching the same presentation on my laptop and I was getting new slides on my Iphone at about the same speed as my computer.
In addition, you can switch from the presentation view to a live chat view and follow along with any Q&A taking place. If you want to see the presenter via their webcam, there is a view for that too. The video quality is not the best, but the fact that you can see a live video feed from a remote users webcam presented on your mobile device is a pretty neat trick. Overall, the way Adobe has leveraged the most important aspects of an online meeting and created different displays, controlled by the user, to help maximize limited screen real estate is pretty impressive.
I’m a traveler and fan of both Adobe and Apple. I know they currently have their differences, but it's nice to see that a little corporate friction is not getting in the way of two innovative companies releasing technology that helps us little guys get more done with less. If you haven’t seen the Acrobat Connect Pro app yet, then you should check it out.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Monday, July 13, 2009
The Meeting Access Dilemma
At this point, I feel confident making the statement that most companies know how to use webconferencing as a vehicle for delivering remote training. The challenge arises when these same companies try to use webconferencing within their learning management systems as a piece of content. No matter which service they are using for webconferencing and no matter which learning management system they have deployed, the same problems tend to rear their ugly heads - managing users, syncing report data and establishing access times for the meeting room.
Envisiontel recently solved this problem for their customers by integrating Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional with Moodle. Envisiontel has been providing elearning solutions using Moodle for several years. It is just in the past few months that we officially launched this as a formal solution.
The system is quite elegant in the way that it manages users across both databases and keeps student grades and activity reports in sync. It's one of our newest enhancements that really makes the system stand out, which is the manner in which it manages actual access to meeting times. It can be a real drag always updating meeting room url's as well as start and end times. This usually means a lot of switching back and forth for the course instructor between multiple systems.
We took a different approach to this dilemma and decided to use the activity editor in Moodle as a way of turning meeting room access on and off. Our new method allows instructors to keep all the basic meeting parameters unchanged on the Adobe Connect server. They simply change the start and stop time for the meeting activity within Moodle and the access link to the meeting room appears or disappears according to those parameters.
This screenshot shows a meeting activity in Moodle where the student is attempting to access the meeting room after the activity has closed. There is no link and the students receive a message indicating that the activity is closed.
Next, we see the edit screen for this activity in Moodle. In the timing section, instructors can choose a time for the activity to be opened and then a time for it to be closed. Not all content on an Adobe Connect server is a live meeting, so this could also be used to set expiration times for content that may become invalid over time for one reason or another.
Finally, after the meeting activity has been updated, students see the actual link for joining the live meeting activity as well as a message indicating the date and time that the activity will close. Using this method allows instructors to use the same meeting room over and over again for different presentations but they can control when students access the room using simple settings within Moodle.
View this recent two minute drill from Envisiontel to see this application in action.
About Envisiontel
Since 2003 Envisiontel has been building multimedia content for elearning. Today, the company offers a full range of products and services that help companies translate their traditional classroom materials into compelling remote learning libraries. Envisiontel is an Adobe Solution partner and reseller, which allows them to mix the power of traditional boxed software with the flexibility of custom services to create tailored training solutions that fit customer’s business needs and deliver on ROI expectations.
Envisiontel recently solved this problem for their customers by integrating Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional with Moodle. Envisiontel has been providing elearning solutions using Moodle for several years. It is just in the past few months that we officially launched this as a formal solution.
The system is quite elegant in the way that it manages users across both databases and keeps student grades and activity reports in sync. It's one of our newest enhancements that really makes the system stand out, which is the manner in which it manages actual access to meeting times. It can be a real drag always updating meeting room url's as well as start and end times. This usually means a lot of switching back and forth for the course instructor between multiple systems.
We took a different approach to this dilemma and decided to use the activity editor in Moodle as a way of turning meeting room access on and off. Our new method allows instructors to keep all the basic meeting parameters unchanged on the Adobe Connect server. They simply change the start and stop time for the meeting activity within Moodle and the access link to the meeting room appears or disappears according to those parameters.
This screenshot shows a meeting activity in Moodle where the student is attempting to access the meeting room after the activity has closed. There is no link and the students receive a message indicating that the activity is closed.
Next, we see the edit screen for this activity in Moodle. In the timing section, instructors can choose a time for the activity to be opened and then a time for it to be closed. Not all content on an Adobe Connect server is a live meeting, so this could also be used to set expiration times for content that may become invalid over time for one reason or another.
Finally, after the meeting activity has been updated, students see the actual link for joining the live meeting activity as well as a message indicating the date and time that the activity will close. Using this method allows instructors to use the same meeting room over and over again for different presentations but they can control when students access the room using simple settings within Moodle.View this recent two minute drill from Envisiontel to see this application in action.
About Envisiontel
Since 2003 Envisiontel has been building multimedia content for elearning. Today, the company offers a full range of products and services that help companies translate their traditional classroom materials into compelling remote learning libraries. Envisiontel is an Adobe Solution partner and reseller, which allows them to mix the power of traditional boxed software with the flexibility of custom services to create tailored training solutions that fit customer’s business needs and deliver on ROI expectations.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Conferencing Companies are so 1980's
So one of my customers needed me to listen to a recorded audio conference the other day so that I could take notes on an elearning project we are building for them. I get an email with a toll free number I need to call and then a confirmation code I need to enter. I asked if I could download the recording as an mp3 or listen to it offline in anyway to which he replied "no". I said "so, I've got to sit tethered to my phone or burn cell phone minutes in order to listen to this meeting"? Yes, he said. What if I need to play certain sections back or what if I can't finish in one sitting and need to come back to it another time? How do I navigate effectively around so that I'm sure to get everything? "I don't know", he said.
As I was having this back and forth with him, it occurred to me that conferencing providers are basically still providing services the same way they did back in the 1980's. I mean, who doesn't have an iPod or some other mobile audio device these days? At a bare minimum, most people in business at least have a laptop, right? This piqued my interest so I did some digging around and what I found out was astonishing.
It seems that most conferencing service providers are making quite the profit these days delivering basic recorded content at a premium cost. I'm not going to pick on anyone in particular (besides, I secretly hope they continue to do business the way they are so that we can keep our own competition to a minimum) but what I discovered was pretty eye opening. For starters, most of the well known providers I researched charge a setup fee of anywhere from $3 to $10. Keep in mind, this is just for pushing the record button on your call and has nothing to do with length. Next, they charge an additional line fee to create the recording. This is basically an extra line that joins the call just like any other participant and is billed at the same rate as every other line in the call. You are essentially paying for another person even though there is no other person. Finally, they charge a playback fee each time someone calls in to listen to the replay which is billed on a per minute basis, just like the live call. The real kicker is if you do want to get your recording in a format that allows you to take it offline like an mp3 file. These same companies charge anywhere from $20 to $50 for the CD and then additional charges for shipping. One company actually told me that I could avoid the shipping fees by downloading the file from an ftp site, but it still cost $5 for that privilege.
Now cost is one thing, but you can't put a price tag on something that helps you be more productive so I started thinking about the issue from a users perspective. "Does accessing my recorded conference from a tethered phone connection make me more productive that having an offline file"? If it does, then the cost is worth it. I could think of a number of scenarios besides my own experience outlined above that would warrant the need for a recorded conference. If I was a team leader in a company and held an all hands call, I might want to record the meeting for those who could not attend such as for folks on vacation. If I was in marketing, I might want to record customer testimonials or interviews and make them available on my web site. Public companies typically record their earnings calls so that analysts can listen at a later time. Get the picture?
Lets look at each of these examples and the impact of current recording options. If I have employees, particularly sales people, that miss a meeting that I need them to hear, am I making them more productive by being tethered to a phone line or would they be better served having a file they could take with them and listen to offline. If I have sales people, I want them to be focused on one thing - growing revenue. This happens by having new conversations with customers or prospects and not sitting at a desk listening to recorded meetings. So, the last thing I would want is for them to get back from vacation and then sit around catching up on missed meeetings. It seems to make more sense to give them an offline file where they could listen to the meetings in their car or on an airplane as they were traveling to and from their appointments. Score one for offline recordings.
Lets look at the marketing example of conducting a remote interview to add testimonials or case studies to my web site. With a traditional conferencing set up, I would have to create pages with instructions for accessing our dial in number so that folks could navigate to and then access the recordings. On top of that, I would be paying for each minute of each access, which in an ideal world would be a lot. This is good for exposure, but how do you budget it?
Do I need to go on? Quite frankly, its pretty hard to come up with a scenario where it's more convenient to dial into a recording rather than have it reside on your mobile device. We live in a world where technology continues to improve the way we communicate, yet we can't seem to get out of the 1980's with one of our most basic business tools.
Envisiontel launched a new conferencing service this year that includes the ability to create recordings free of charge. Furthermore, users can log in to their accounts from our home page using their conference ID's and PIN's. Once logged in, list filters help them find and then download their conferences as mp3 files. These files can now be distributed anyway the company likes and can even be loaded into a podcast system and published to a number of podcast aggregators including iTunes.
Companies like Apple have changed the landscape of how we receive and interact with on-demand content. I think it's time that our live communication vehicles catch up and finally leave that ugly decade called the 80's in the past.
Matt Lee is the founder and president of Envisiontel.
As I was having this back and forth with him, it occurred to me that conferencing providers are basically still providing services the same way they did back in the 1980's. I mean, who doesn't have an iPod or some other mobile audio device these days? At a bare minimum, most people in business at least have a laptop, right? This piqued my interest so I did some digging around and what I found out was astonishing.
It seems that most conferencing service providers are making quite the profit these days delivering basic recorded content at a premium cost. I'm not going to pick on anyone in particular (besides, I secretly hope they continue to do business the way they are so that we can keep our own competition to a minimum) but what I discovered was pretty eye opening. For starters, most of the well known providers I researched charge a setup fee of anywhere from $3 to $10. Keep in mind, this is just for pushing the record button on your call and has nothing to do with length. Next, they charge an additional line fee to create the recording. This is basically an extra line that joins the call just like any other participant and is billed at the same rate as every other line in the call. You are essentially paying for another person even though there is no other person. Finally, they charge a playback fee each time someone calls in to listen to the replay which is billed on a per minute basis, just like the live call. The real kicker is if you do want to get your recording in a format that allows you to take it offline like an mp3 file. These same companies charge anywhere from $20 to $50 for the CD and then additional charges for shipping. One company actually told me that I could avoid the shipping fees by downloading the file from an ftp site, but it still cost $5 for that privilege.
Now cost is one thing, but you can't put a price tag on something that helps you be more productive so I started thinking about the issue from a users perspective. "Does accessing my recorded conference from a tethered phone connection make me more productive that having an offline file"? If it does, then the cost is worth it. I could think of a number of scenarios besides my own experience outlined above that would warrant the need for a recorded conference. If I was a team leader in a company and held an all hands call, I might want to record the meeting for those who could not attend such as for folks on vacation. If I was in marketing, I might want to record customer testimonials or interviews and make them available on my web site. Public companies typically record their earnings calls so that analysts can listen at a later time. Get the picture?
Lets look at each of these examples and the impact of current recording options. If I have employees, particularly sales people, that miss a meeting that I need them to hear, am I making them more productive by being tethered to a phone line or would they be better served having a file they could take with them and listen to offline. If I have sales people, I want them to be focused on one thing - growing revenue. This happens by having new conversations with customers or prospects and not sitting at a desk listening to recorded meetings. So, the last thing I would want is for them to get back from vacation and then sit around catching up on missed meeetings. It seems to make more sense to give them an offline file where they could listen to the meetings in their car or on an airplane as they were traveling to and from their appointments. Score one for offline recordings.
Lets look at the marketing example of conducting a remote interview to add testimonials or case studies to my web site. With a traditional conferencing set up, I would have to create pages with instructions for accessing our dial in number so that folks could navigate to and then access the recordings. On top of that, I would be paying for each minute of each access, which in an ideal world would be a lot. This is good for exposure, but how do you budget it?
Do I need to go on? Quite frankly, its pretty hard to come up with a scenario where it's more convenient to dial into a recording rather than have it reside on your mobile device. We live in a world where technology continues to improve the way we communicate, yet we can't seem to get out of the 1980's with one of our most basic business tools.
Envisiontel launched a new conferencing service this year that includes the ability to create recordings free of charge. Furthermore, users can log in to their accounts from our home page using their conference ID's and PIN's. Once logged in, list filters help them find and then download their conferences as mp3 files. These files can now be distributed anyway the company likes and can even be loaded into a podcast system and published to a number of podcast aggregators including iTunes.
Companies like Apple have changed the landscape of how we receive and interact with on-demand content. I think it's time that our live communication vehicles catch up and finally leave that ugly decade called the 80's in the past.
Matt Lee is the founder and president of Envisiontel.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Introducing Enlighten CRM
I've been wanting to start a blog for some time now. Of course, I hear everyone say this as we are all trying to take advantage of the inherent benefits that social media can provide us as business leaders. It seems that you just need two things to pull it off, time and something to say. Those who know me know that I'm never short on the latter, but having the former in the world of start up innovation is quite the parlor trick. So, it is with giddy excitement that I introduce the first of what I hope will be a long running series of blog posts to discuss the world of dynamic media and elearning.
My main motivation for writing this is very self serving as we have a new product offering that we want to share, well, with everyone. About two years ago we were approached by an organization looking to integrate Moodle, an open source learning management system, with Salesforce.com, the worlds leading CRM as a service. At the time, we were using both platforms and had already done a little integration as far as synchronizing the Moodle registration form with the "web-to-leads" function of Salesforce.com. Essentially, we were deploying training and just wanting to map any new users we were seeing into Salesforce so that we could do like everyone else and provide some kind of organized follow up to grow our business.
Apparently this was the most extensive LMS to Salesforce integration that this customer had found in their research. In fact, we were one of the only Learning Management providers that had even heard of Salesforce.com, which I guess makes sense considering traditional LMS platforms are typically an HR function and therefore tend to be integrated with systems such as Peoplesoft or some other type of ERP system. Long story short, after a few meetings to scope out their exact needs, we began work on a six month project to integrate Moodle and Salesforce.com.
Now the intended purpose for this integration at the start was two fold. The customer needed a way to flag customers in Salesforce.com based on the level of training they were qualified for. Meaning, did they purchase some type of premium content or did they simply qualify for their free training curriculum. Second, they wanted to be able to report on training completion status, grades and viewed content from within Salesforce.com so that they could create dashboards for executives just like the pipeline and closed deal dashboards that were already being used.
The system does all of this and more, but I want to focus this article on one item that was not really intended from the get go, lead generation! The system has been in a production environment for about a year now and apart from the usual deployment hiccups and training issues, has been a huge success. The most satisfying feedback we have received was from the Marketing Executives who told us that the system is helping them not only generate a greater number of leads at virtually no additional cost but the system is giving them unheard of visibility into the needs and interests of their biggest customers.
You see, when companies sell products and services to an organization like a Microsoft, an Amazon or a Yahoo, the typical sales process usually only involves a handful of key decision makers and influencers within the customer. Many times companies will negotiate six figure deals and really only establish relationships with these few key individuals. Over time, these people leave or companies restructure which can place folks in new roles, so maintaining a strong customer service relationship can be a real challenge. We are finding that our new product, Enlighten CRM, can help companies establish and grow new relationships within their customers. It can give them incredible visibility into which aspects of their products are garnering the most attention and demand, opening the door for future communications that are targeted and relevant to what the end users of these customers really want.
Most importantly, remember how we discussed the handful of contacts that drive a purchase? Well these few individuals are not the only users of a product or service within a company. They made the decision, yes, but a true enterprise service will be used by hundreds if not thousands of users within a company. By deploying your training content through Enlighten CRM and gaining visibility within Salesforce.com, it opens up the door for countless leads to be populated in your CRM from the most valuable resource any company has, its own customers. At the end of the day, isn't it easier to up sell and grow existing customers rather than have to spend money to acquire new ones?
My main motivation for writing this is very self serving as we have a new product offering that we want to share, well, with everyone. About two years ago we were approached by an organization looking to integrate Moodle, an open source learning management system, with Salesforce.com, the worlds leading CRM as a service. At the time, we were using both platforms and had already done a little integration as far as synchronizing the Moodle registration form with the "web-to-leads" function of Salesforce.com. Essentially, we were deploying training and just wanting to map any new users we were seeing into Salesforce so that we could do like everyone else and provide some kind of organized follow up to grow our business.
Apparently this was the most extensive LMS to Salesforce integration that this customer had found in their research. In fact, we were one of the only Learning Management providers that had even heard of Salesforce.com, which I guess makes sense considering traditional LMS platforms are typically an HR function and therefore tend to be integrated with systems such as Peoplesoft or some other type of ERP system. Long story short, after a few meetings to scope out their exact needs, we began work on a six month project to integrate Moodle and Salesforce.com.
Now the intended purpose for this integration at the start was two fold. The customer needed a way to flag customers in Salesforce.com based on the level of training they were qualified for. Meaning, did they purchase some type of premium content or did they simply qualify for their free training curriculum. Second, they wanted to be able to report on training completion status, grades and viewed content from within Salesforce.com so that they could create dashboards for executives just like the pipeline and closed deal dashboards that were already being used.
The system does all of this and more, but I want to focus this article on one item that was not really intended from the get go, lead generation! The system has been in a production environment for about a year now and apart from the usual deployment hiccups and training issues, has been a huge success. The most satisfying feedback we have received was from the Marketing Executives who told us that the system is helping them not only generate a greater number of leads at virtually no additional cost but the system is giving them unheard of visibility into the needs and interests of their biggest customers.
You see, when companies sell products and services to an organization like a Microsoft, an Amazon or a Yahoo, the typical sales process usually only involves a handful of key decision makers and influencers within the customer. Many times companies will negotiate six figure deals and really only establish relationships with these few key individuals. Over time, these people leave or companies restructure which can place folks in new roles, so maintaining a strong customer service relationship can be a real challenge. We are finding that our new product, Enlighten CRM, can help companies establish and grow new relationships within their customers. It can give them incredible visibility into which aspects of their products are garnering the most attention and demand, opening the door for future communications that are targeted and relevant to what the end users of these customers really want.
Most importantly, remember how we discussed the handful of contacts that drive a purchase? Well these few individuals are not the only users of a product or service within a company. They made the decision, yes, but a true enterprise service will be used by hundreds if not thousands of users within a company. By deploying your training content through Enlighten CRM and gaining visibility within Salesforce.com, it opens up the door for countless leads to be populated in your CRM from the most valuable resource any company has, its own customers. At the end of the day, isn't it easier to up sell and grow existing customers rather than have to spend money to acquire new ones?
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