webqem blog

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

ZDNet recently featured an article on Fone Zone’s implementation of Adobe Connect, a solution that was recommended and implemented by webqem. Fone Zone had, in the past, trained employees using PowerPoint. The impetus had been on Fone Zone’s employees to go online and download the presentations themselves. webqem’s solution using Adobe Connect, allows Fone Zone to deliver live PowerPoint content to mulitple employees at once. Read the whole article here.

Computerworld recently featured an article about webqem’s implementation of Adobe Connect for ING Australia. The article explains the issues that ING Australia faced with their current training process and how Adobe Connect was able to streamline this process, by providing an ongoing help system that is contextual and relevant. Read the whole article here.

The Challenge

Hyundai Motor Company Australia had a requirement to assess 1400 technicians across Australia within a month. Their specific requirements were:

• Assessment for three different technician levels.
• Each assessment would be timed for 60 minutes and consist of 40 multiple choice questions that would be pulled randomly from its own unique pool of up to 120 questions.
• Each assessment would consist of varying quantities of questions, based on three levels of difficulty: easy, even and hard.
• Marking of the assessment would only occur once the participant had indicated that they’d completed or if the exam had timed out.
• Participants would be allowed to review the exam results once completed.
• The assessment participants would be tracked on their number of attempts.
• For Hyundai’s analysis, the solution also needed to collect data on the questions, such as how often a question was successfully answered and which answers were selected for each question.

The Solution

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