Yes, well there are a couple of catches. It is free, but you can only have yourself and two other people in the same room. What is cool is that like Microsoft's live messenger offerings that come with space to store your stuff and tools to edit things, and Google's things that do the same thing, Adobe has glued together its offerings so you can whip up a presentation online, prepare a spreadsheet or convert something to PDF (apparently only 5 times in the free version but that is fine).

The main things is that you get to work with Adobe Connect 7.5 in a slightly cut down version... You can share video, chat, your screen with up to three people (including you) in a self branded virtual room.

You cannot save the state of the room with things like a layout containing pods that you have arranged for a particular kind of session. You can upload files, but you can't play them using a share pod as you can in connect.

BUT... If you were using it to coach and you had your content... your asynchronous content (ie stuff you had prepared earlier) stored somewhere so that your learners could access it - that could be in the cloud - the Internet cloud that is, or on a memory stick or on a LAN somewhere, then you could get together on ConnectNow (which is what they call the free version of Adobe Connect) - lay out the game plan for learning, studying and collaborating and then set them loose on the existing content or work through an online exercise or just answer questions.

So, if you haven't got one, get across to http://acrobat.com grab an id and establish yourself an account. Look around the meeting features and then invite someone in to video conference with you.

My conference room is https://connectnow.acrobat.com/markjchristie so, just like skype we can conduct a video call and share our desktop. I woulld use this for non-work related sessions like for Joe's (my son) Karate, Basketball or the school fete. Of course there is a great potential use in the aviation safety world.

From a work perspective, I would like folks to try this out because when they are at work, the interface will be very familiar once we upgrade to Adobe Connect 7.5 which will be in the next month or so.

I would love to hear from you if you are using ConnectNow and I really see a place for this technology in delivering training from our Recreational Aviation Headquarters in Canberra to our ten thousand pilots across Australia. Luckily within my day job we have a choice of not one, but two video conferencing solutions that can be used to deliver learning to our students, regardless of whether they are satellite Internet users or part of our impressive broadband network for schools here in the Northern Territory of Australia.

 

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