webqem blog

On Friday 6th August the new look Core Equity Services website was revealed.

Originally launching in March 2009, Core Equity Services represents the consolidation and history of some of Australia’s pioneers in straight-through equities trading and broking services.

Since that time, Core Equity is a leading provider of wholesale broking solutions to some of Australia’s largest financial institutions, offering a range of products and services.

The new look and feel is aimed to showcase the entire product range that sits under the Core Equity umbrella in a simple and easy to navigate website.

Mark Upton, specialist coach for the Adelaide crows, approached webqem for advice on how to solve their issues around reviewing game footage. Previously players and coaches had to watch the game together to gather feed back, which didn’t make efficient use of their time. The solution was eLearning, using Adobe Flash Media Server, LiveCycle Collaboration Service, Connect and Adobe Captivate Mark has created a remote access training environment and conduct regular training with interactive opportunities.

As a result, the Adelaide Football Club have streamlined access to training, greater flexibility for the team players and coaches to meet and discuss strategies in real time and improve retention of training information.

Read the full success story to find out more about how webqem helped the Adelaide Football Club

Massey University has officially announced this week the purchase and rollout of a number of Adobe Products.

Inline with Massey Universities 2020 strategy for teaching and learning, Mark Brown Director of Distance Education has announced the expansion of their electronic tool set to include:

• Acrobat Pro
• Adobe Presenter
• Adobe Connect

Acrobat Pro will enable them to enhance their accessibility, usability and quality of some of their online material. Presenter amplifies the teachers voice and provides a more engaging interaction with subject content online, and Connect will connect (pardon the pun) teachers with their students, including regular online tutorials, consultations with small groups, and offshore distance delivery.

Read the Massey article or view Adobe announcement presentation.

webqem looks forward to hearing the creative uses of these tools throughout the University.

The power of Adobe Connect Pro has found its way into a unique not-for-profit organisation by the name of Mensheds Australia. Mensheds Australia specialise in the health and well-being of men through local organisations that act like a social groups aka a ‘Men’s shed’.

One of the biggest challenges faced by Mensheds Australia was reaching men throughout the country, in particular in remote areas. Furthermore, even where men’s sheds have been established, successfully managing and maintaining them was particularly hard to achieve from head office in Sydney as each men’s shed requires resources, training, and detailed information 24/7.

So, thanks to the team at webqem, Mensheds Australia has implemented a very successful solution – Adobe Connect Pro. From an administrative perspective, Connect Pro has drastically reduced the cost of delivery, travel, training, and Occupational Health & Safety compliance. Explains managing director Peter Sergeant, “When you consider the thousands of documents and information packages used by Mensheds Australia to communicate and collaborate with individual men’s sheds and our partners everywhere, Acrobat Connect Pro is worth approximately $5 million to our organisation.”

Now Mensheds can conduct online meetings to remote areas via Connect Meetings. They can provide access to an plethora of information via the Connect Pro Training module, and can easily create engaging mulitmedia presentations via Adobe Presenter.

The feedback from supporters and stakeholders on the organisation’s portal, www.mensheds.com.au has been outstanding and exceeded all expectations. “Simply put, without Acrobat Connect Professional, we would not have been able to continue with our work at Mensheds,” concludes Sergeant. “We couldn’t deliver the volume of information needed anywhere near as efficiently and compellingly without the Adobe software.”

For more information about this success story, you can view a full article online.

Leading kitchen retailer – Australian Kitchen Industries (AKI), is prospering from the power of Adobe Connect Pro. In recent years, AKI has significantly grown and prospered into a large franchise. With this growth, communicating with, and training it’s geographically dispersed network of franchisees had become particularly difficult and more costly. To streamline training and communications company-wide, AKI found a cost-effective, powerful solution: Adobe Presenter and Adobe Connect Pro software.

Since implementing Connect Pro, AKI have noticeably benefited from the high-impact web conferencing and ease of access that eLearning provides. Over 400 people across the company are now using Connect Pro to conduct online meetings and training. The solution has been so successful that it, amazingly, paid for itself within the first seven months. The team from webqem were instrumental in implementing this solution, which involved: software procurement, installation, hosting & training. A full report is available online.

The number of people in the world using Adobe Connect Pro is set for a massive increase in users as Adobe has secured a huge US$9.5 million with the U.S. Marines Corps. The Marine Corps cited several factors for choosing the awesome Connect Pro: stringent standards for security, availability & quality, and the solution is “Joint Interoperability & Test Command Certified” – so troops can connect quickly across any Department of Defense network (who already have Connect Pro). Connect, being based on the Flash platform, which is on 98% of internet-enable  desktops, was, as always, a major selling point..

This deal was great news for our Connect Pro team at webqem, as it demonstrates the quality and high-value placed on one of our top solutions that we specialize in. We can only hope more of the armed forces choose Connect Pro as their preferred solution and expand the Connect user base. A full report on this is available online.

Building studies and virtual classrooms? You would not think they go together. However, a keen teacher from Armidale TAFE in NSW, has managed to successfully put the two together with the use of Adobe’s Connect Pro. Graeme Wilton regularly uses Connect Pro to teach his teach his Certificate IV in Building Studies course to a range of distance education students in North-West NSW. His students “absolutely love it”.  He says that “It’s added an enthusiasm that I haven’t seen for a while, but I must say that part of that would come from me because I’m a little ‘g-ed’ up about the whole thing too,” he laughs.

This is another Connect Pro success story that the webqem team was instrumental in – Good work team! You can read the full report here.

CCTVCOM is the internet portal of the largest professional television broadcasting media organisation in China. CCTVCOM was the official internet/mobile broadcaster for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, enabling millions of sports fans in mainland China and Macau to vividly experience Olympic videos built on Adobe Flash and Flex technology.

CCTV needed a solution that supported a large-scale, highly flexible, robust balancing network of high concurrent streaming media. Partnering with Adobe allowed them to deliver a compelling consistent Web 2.0 user experience, such as a 3D TV wall and seamless integration of viewing with live chat functions. The architecture involved a multi-city node origin/edge distribution mechanism.

During the games there were over 832 million visits, with over 46.6 million on-demand video playbacks delivered via Flash Media Server technology, with the maximum concurrent users of live chat room reaching 90,000 and over 10,000 video clips, including whole matches, highlights, extra new and interviews.

Read more about CCTV and FMS

Royal Philips Electronics have introduced Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional as a part of their training strategy. Connect’s Training and Meeting modules are being used to deliver training, video conferencing and web seminars to a potential audience of 135,000 registered users of its Healthcare Learning Management System.

Philips has integrated Connect into their in-house SCORM-compliant Learning Management System, using it as part of their healthcare education programs globally.

Additional information is available online from this press release.

A new study commissioned by the United Nations has found that most websites fail to meet basic accessibility guidelines. The study found that 78 per cent of sites reviewed used colour combinations of poor contrast, 87 per cent caused pop-up windows to appear without warning and 92 per cent failed to provide keyboard shortcuts. Designing websites that are usable and accessible to a broad range of users has always been a focus at webqem. We design and code all sites to the minimum W3C conformity of ‘A’, which inlcudes XHTML 1.0 Transitional, CSS2 and DOM based scripting.

To read more about accessbility and usability on the web follow the links below.

• Sydney Morning Herald article: Behind closed doors
• W3C Web accessibility guidelines
• International Day of People with Disabilities