LAGS SOMEWHAT BEHIND WE¬bEx's many services and even Micro¬soft's Live Meeting in terms of popu¬larity, but Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional is a combination of the company's web development expertise and all the tools you'd expect from a Web-con¬ferencing solution. Some users might be put off by the total dependency on Flash, though in my testing it was hardly an issue. An important issue might be the effort required to become a skilled user-only Live Meeting rivaled Acrobat Connect Pro in depth of features, both products re¬quiring a substantial effort to learn First things first: The "Acrobat" part of the name isn't an accident.

If you use recent versions of Acrobat Creator, including Creator 8, you'll see a Start Meeting button on the application's toolbar enabling users to create a PDF and simultaneously annotate it along with coworkers. But that's just a convenience button for folks looking to share PDF content quickly, or create e-learning and presentation content in Creator and upload it directly to Connect Pro. But Acrobat Connect Professional is about much more than sharing PDFs; it's the most complete all-in-one Web-conferencing solution I've seen.



The application's four end-user components (Meeting, Presenter, Training, and Events) all run from a fifth Connect Server component, which you can access either as an Adobe -hosted solu¬tion or purchase and install in your own network. Meeting is the Web-conferencing framework, Presenter lets participants author shared content, Training tracks and manages an e-learning curriculum, Events handles event management, including lead-capturing for both e-learning and sales efforts. There are three default layouts for meetings-Sharing, Discussion, and Collaboration-each popping up a predefined set of pod tools in a preset layout. Meeting administrators can select other tool pods, position them any way they like on the meeting space, and save the whole thing as a custom layout. No other Web¬conferencing tool in recent tests has proven this impressively well designed.

In fact, Connect Professional does a creditable job across the board, although ease of use might prove a problem for some. Connect Professional might be the most feature-rich of all the tools I reviewed. Users must spend a significant amount of time learning before becoming comfortable with the product. The depth of the product's e¬learning and seminar features outstrips that of every rival I've reviewed, including HearMe. And since the users in companies using Connect Professional for those purposes will be trained, ease of use will be less of an issue.