Creating an On Demand Resource Library Using Connect Pro Meeting

  
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One of the unique features of Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro is the fact that Connect Pro meetings are persistent. By this I mean that when you enter a meeting room, it is left in the exact same state as when you last left the meeting room. The selected layout, pod configurations, chat pod or whiteboard content and any other option are preserved across sessions and Im sure that youve found this functionality to be useful.

However, another way that you leverage this capability is by creating an on demand library of resources that others can access anytime, anywhere. This is a practice used regularly within Adobe and the type of feature that you wont know how you lived without once you try it.

Before diving into the technical aspects of how to create your On Demand Resource Library, lets take a look at a sample so you can better understand how this functionality may help you.


Fig. 1. This is an example of an On Demand Resource Library put together by an Adobe Sales Rep for Connect Pro Trial Customers. To experience this library yourself, visit https://admin.acrobat.com/_a183899/connecttrial/ and login as a guest.

This is a sample meeting room that one of our Sales Reps has put together to send to his clients who are currently in a Connect Pro trial. However, what is unique about this meeting room is that the sales rep isnt even in the room, and yet, as a trial user, I have one click access to the tools that I will find most useful to make the most of my trial experience. The room is branded with a banner, includes a personal message from an executive, links to relevant resources and even the product documentation that I can download directly from the meeting room. He has even gone through and personalized the meeting room with his contact information and a chat message inviting me to ask him questions. Whats more is that the sales rep doesnt even need to be in the room for me to leverage these resources because he has set it up in such a way that I can simply login as a guest, and browse through the resources. Whats more is that since you have the ability to link to other documents rather than uploading them to the room, you can ensure that room visitors are always viewing the most up to date version of the content.

By leveraging Connect Pro, a non-technical sales rep was able to setup a professional looking, readily available Resource Library without having to know HTML or have access to a web server or FTP server. While this specific example demonstrates how you can use this functionality in a sales situation, this can also be applied across many other areas. For example, if you are in project management or engineering, you can use this capability to provide access to project documents. If you are in customer support, you can create a customized room for each client, to keep customer documents organized. If you are in legal, you can use the file sharing capabilities to exchange documents with a client or colleague. Marketing professionals can provide additional context around documents that would not be possible with a traditional FTP file sharing. And there are numerous other ways that you can leverage this feature to create a better file sharing experience.

Building An On Demand Resource Library

So now that you understand some of the ways in which youd want to use Connect Pro to create an on demand Resource Library, lets walk through how you can create one for your own use.

Step 1: Create a Meeting Room

Begin by creating a meeting room as you normally would in Connect Pro Central. Give the meeting a name and a custom URL as you want the URL to be easy to remember for you and whomever you are sharing it with. Now the key to making this work is by selecting the right access model for the room.

Fig. 2. To make the meeting room accessible to your audience without your being present, choose the Anyone who has the URL for the meeting can enter the room option.
Make sure you select Anyone who has the URL for the meeting can enter the room. If you do not do this, the person you send the URL will not be able to enter unless you are in the room to accept them and they will be stuck in the waiting room with a message saying that the meeting has not yet started. By selecting this last access option, the user will be immediately let into the room.

Fig. 3. If you choose either of the first two access options, the user will be stuck at the waiting room screen and not be able to enter the room without you accepting them.

Complete the meeting setup wizard and enter the room.

Step 2: Setting Up Your Room

So now that youve created your meeting room, its time to populate the room with your library of content, decide which pods will be visible to visitors, and optionally brand the room. Because the room is being used not to meet live, but rather to view and share documents asynchronously, the pods that you want visible will likely be different. For example, there isnt much use for an Attendee List or Camera and Voice pod if there is only going to be one person in the room. So as is the case of the Adobe Sales Rep example, youll likely want to hide these pods from view.

Fig. 4. Hide pods such as the Attendee List or Camera and Voice Pods that wont be used to focus your visitors and take advantage of all of the meeting room real estate.

It is also important to note that users who enter the room will do so as Participants meaning they wont be able to change layouts, so all content you want them to see should be on one layout. You will probably want to delete the other layouts to prevent any possible confusion or user error on your part. If you have the wrong layout selected and leave the room, the next time a user enters the room, they will see the wrong content without the ability to change to the correct layout.

After hiding Pods that you wont use, its time to add Pods that you do want to use. Most likely youll want to have a File Share Pod where you can upload files that your visitors can download. You also might want to upload graphics or video message into a Share pod. While I wont go into the specific mechanics of how to add new pods or upload content to pods, here are a few links to tutorials that might be of use to you if you are unsure how to do any of these tasks:

Managing Pods (Adobe Captivate demo, 4:32)
Managing Layouts (Adobe Captivate demo, 4:14)
Using the File Share Pod (Adobe Captivate demo, 2:24)
Sharing PowerPoint Presentations (Adobe Captivate demo)
Share Flash Video (Adobe Captivate demo, 1:47)
Sharing Images, Audio, and Custom Flash Applications (Adobe Captivate demo, 4:03)
Sharing FlashPaper Documents (Adobe Captivate demo, 3:08)
View more tutorials on how to share content at the Connect Pro Resource Center.

Before leaving this step 2 there are few tips and tricks that I want to point out to you:

Create a PowerPoint Slide with Links and other Contexual Information
An easy way to provide a list of relevant links to your visitors is to create a single slide Presentation in PowerPoint that contains a list of links and other contextual information. Remember that you won't be in the room with the user so you want to make sure you provide as much assistance as possible for the user to find what they are looking for. Providing a single slide with relevant information can be a perfect way to achieve this. To create a resource like this:

1. Create a list of titles on your PowerPoint slide. You also might want to add some contextual or introductory text on the slide to help guide the visitor.
2. For each item in the list add a Hyperlink using PowerPoint.
3. Save the PowerPoint presentation.
4. Upload to a Share Pod.
5. When the presentation loads, the hyperlinks should be active.

Fig. 5. Use PowerPoint as an authoring environment to create a list of links or to include any text, diagrams, or images you want to share with your audience.

Hyperlinks added to PowerPoint presentations are retained when you upload the presentation to Connect Pro so you can use this mechanism to provide a list of clickable links for someone to follow

Name Your Pods
Since you wont be in the room with the visitor to answer any questions they may have you want to provide as much guidance as you can. One easy way to do this is by renaming Pods with descriptive titles. So if you are going to use a Note pod to include contact information, change the Pod title to reflect this from Note to My Contact Info. Doing this is only going to make it easier for your visitor to find what they are looking for.

Fig. 6. Renaming pods can provide the context that your guests will need to find what they need without you in the room.

Use Multiple Versions of the Same Pod Type
Connect Pro allows you to have multiple instances of the same type of pod in your meeting room. For example you can have two File Share pods or two Share Pods in the same layout. So, for example, you may have two different types of documents that you want to share. Instead of putting all of the documents into a single File Share pod, create two File Share pods and clearly title the Pod to reflect what kind of documents it contains.

Fig. 7. In this example, Ive used two File Share pods to make two different types of documents available and a Note pod to provide step by step download instructions.

Add a Personal Touch
Even though you wont be in the room at the same time as your visitor, there are a few ways that you can add a personal touch to the room to make it more inviting and give it that personal touch. One simple way to do this is by adding a meeting background. Another way to do this is to include your contact info in a Note pod so someone can get in touch with you if they have a question.Even better than this would be adding a video message. This can be a great way to communicate directly with your visitors even if you are not there. Even if you dont have access to a video production team, you can use a tool like Adobe Presenter or Adobe Visual Communicator to record a message simply using a webcam. Another option is the free Adobe Flash Media Live Video Encoder.

Uploading a simple virtual business card can be another great way to connecting with users. Using an image editing tool such as Adobe Photoshop (or even PowerPoint), you can create a polished and professional business card and add a personal touch to the room so that when your guests arrive, they immediately know that they have come to the right place. If you are saving your virtual business card as an image, make sure you save it as a JPG as this is the only file type supported for upload into a Share Pod.

Fig. 8. Adding a virtual business card and personalized note can put your guests at ease and let them immediately know they have come to the right place. One thing to note is that I've made the background color black to match the color that a Share Pod uses when a JPEG is uploaded into it.

Step 3: Testing Your Room

While you are setting up your room, you can select Present > Make me a Participant. When you do this, all of the Host and Presenter controls will disappear and you can see the room exactly as a Participant would . You can use this method to determine if pods are positioned in the right place and that content behaves in the correct way. To return to Host view, select Present > Make Me a Host.

Fig. 9. While you are setting up your room, you can switch to Participant view to preview how your guests will experience the room.

Once you are satisfied with the way your meeting room is setup, youll want to do one last check to make sure that guests can correctly access the room. To do this, close the meeting window and log out of Connect Pro Central. Then type (or Paste) the meeting URL in a browser window. You should see the standard meeting login screen:

Fig. 10. The meeting login screen. If you will be sharing access to the room with non-Connect Pro users, you may want add (Enter as Guest) to the Meeting Title so that they do not try to enter in a login and password.

Be sure to enter as a Guest to mimic the guest experience and enter the room. If you are taken immediately into the meeting, you have correctly configured the Access setting. Once in the room try to download documents or click links to make sure everything is working as expected. If it is, then you are ready to share your Resource Library with others.

Step 4: Sharing Your Room

Sharing your Resource Library is easy. All a user needs to access the room is the room URL so you can email it to users, recite it over the phone, include it in your email signature or on a web page, or any other method you deem appropriate. So for example, if you visit http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/weblinksexample you can view a reference Resource Library that we have been building throughout this tutorial.

One thing to note is that if you wish to create a different instance of the Resource Library per audience or client, it would make sense to turn your room into a template that you could then replicate as many times as you needed. If you do not know how to create a Meeting Template, view this tutorial.

Step 5: Monitor Who Has Visited

Once youve set up your on demand Resource Library, there are a number of items you might want to track. For example, you may want to see how many times the room has been visited and by whom, when it was last visited. You can do this by visiting the meeting reports. To do this, find the meeting in Connect Pro Central and click on the title to view meeting details. Then click on the Reports link. On the summary page, youll see information such as the Most Recent Session, which in this case is the last time someone visited your Resource Library. If you click By Attendees youll see a complete list of who visited your room, when they visited, and for how long. This can be an invaluable tool to see who has visited the room and provides you with the opportunity to follow up with these users.

Fig. 11. The By Attendees report shows you who has visited your resource library and when they visited.

Summary

I hope that you have found this tutorial helpful. While this is definitely not a core use case of the product, I think that once you try this out, youll find Connect Pro to be an invaluable tool for sharing information with people both within your organization and outside of your firewall.
Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.