Peter Ryce, technical evangelist for Acrobat Connect Pro, says the Web conferencing solution has had telephony integration with solutions from such companies as Avaya, Cisco and Premiere Global Services (News - Alert), but that Adobe has expanded on that by also doing “tight integration” with InterCall. This integration outfits meeting participants with such capabilities as the ability todial out to individuals, see who’s talking, mute people and put them on hold -- all through a visual user interface using XML Web services on the back end talking to InterCall (News - Alert) (or other telephony integration partner) servers, Ryce explains.

 

Additionally, Adobe now offers a new feature called Universal Voice. This feature allows the Connect meeting to dial a 1-800 number to bring conferencing service providers into the mix. Adobe added media gateway functionality to its server, which acts as a bridge for transport protocols, using SIP and RTP to make the outbound communication with the conferencing service provider. That service provider then returns something like G.711 audio, and the Adobe server converts that to Flash audio, and broadcasts it within the meeting room.

 

“We recognize there are hundreds of audio-conferencing service providers, so there’s no way we could have that integration and relationship with all of them,” says Ryce. “And yet for many customers, they are more wedded to their audio conferencing than they are to any particular Web conferencing. So for those customers we have a new thing that’s called Universal Voice.”

 

In yet another announcement today, Adobe is introducing Connect Pro Webcast, a hosted service sold on a per-event basis for Webcasts targeting very large audiences. The service, which includes pre-meeting registration, in-meeting technical support, the ability to record the meeting and optional production services, can support up to 80,000 simultaneous users. Pricing for this service starts at $6,000 to $7,000 for audio only, but increases for those that want a video component and/or video production services.

Adobe also revealed today that it has expanded on its secure desktop meeting offerings by allowing hosted users to set up a white list to decide what applications can be shared. The feature was added with the financial vertical in mind, according to Ryce, adding this has been an existing feature available to Connect Pro customers that run the solution on their own premises.

 

While Adobe has long offered both hosted and on premises versions of its Connect Pro, the company today says it has also added a managed service option to the mix. Customers of this new option can integrate Connect Pro with LDAP and other back-end systems, but Adobe will manage the updates of software as it does for the hosted option.

 

Finally, Adobe today announced an iPhone (News - Alert) version of the Connect meeting. Flash developers can now use the Flash authoring environment and ask it to export as an iPhone app, which they can then present to the Apple App Store store for distribution. Because this is a Flash application, Ryce says, it can run on other Flash-enabled devices. In fact, Google (News - Alert) is embedding Flash player in its Android OS for smartphones, as is RIM for its BlackBerry.