In Adobe Connect Essential Training, author Tim Plumer, Jr. explains how to deliver and host interactive web meetings, webinars, and e-learning tutorials using Adobe Connect. The course covers the software's many tools for streamlining communication and engaging participants, such as the screen sharing, full-screen, and whiteboard features. Also included are tutorials on recording presentations, video conferencing, and using Connect with an iPhone or Android-based smartphone. Exercise files accompany the course.
A PowerPoint file is certainly a common thing to share. Many, many meetings at least use them somewhat. But if that's all you are doing with your Connect instance, you are not getting the full advantage that Connect has to offer. A Share pod can hold one of six different file types and PowerPoint is only one of those file types. So there are actually five others that you can use. What I'd like to do is just introduce you to those other file types so that you can understand what types of content you can share in a Share pod. We're going to dig into each of those different types a little bit more fully later on.
First though, let's just get started with understanding what they are and then we'll load them into a Share pod to see them in action. So I am going to go ahead this Share pod and I am going to resize it to get myself some room on the stage here. Create another Share pod and the next most common file type I use is a JPEG file because I can use a JPEG for a couple of different kinds of things. For example, a document or an image that I want to mark up. So to add a JPEG file, I am going to go through the same basic process that I did with the PowerPoint.
I will Share Document > Browse My Computer. In this case I have a document that I scanned and saved to JPEG. So I will select that and click Open and there we go. Now, this document is a little bit difficult to read because the Share pod is kind of small but I just wanted to show you that I can put one in there. The next type of document that I use and probably next with respect to the amount that I use it is a PDF file. So let's go ahead and add another new Share pod. We'll go ahead and add a PDF to it. And if you're familiar at all with the free Adobe Reader, what Connects does is it sort of gives you a little bit of the Free Adobe Reader right here in the Share pod.
So it works just about exactly like a PDF on the Desktop except that you're sharing it with others. The next type of file that I can upload is an MP3 file for sound. We'll go ahead and upload that. Browse My Computer and here is a podcast that I want to share with my audience. Click Open. Now, I am not going to get much of a visual here because this is a sound file. So it's just sort of some light space but there are controllers here at the bottom that allow me to play the MP3 file, and then last but not least among the file types I am going to show you here is an FLV file.
Now, if you're not familiar with FLVs, let me get my Share pod open and I will start uploading it. Browse My Computer and there is my FLV. We'll click Open. An FLV is a Flash Video file and the reason that we can share all of these different file types within Connect is because the Flash Media Server, which is a tool that comes from Adobe, is kind of at the heart of the solution. So it allows me to share information or stream that information from the Connect server out to my audience.
FLV as a video type is something that the Flash Media Server supports and so it allows me to upload that and then I can stream it out. If I don't have an FLV file, I am going to need to convert to FLV from MOV or whatever video file type that I have and Adobe has a whole toolset for that and lynda has some really great training that will help you understand how to create FLVs if you don't have one. Of course, if you don't have one for this practice session, I've provided you both an FLV and an MP3 plus the JPEG and the other files that you are looking at here, so that you that you can experiment with them.
So these are five of the six file types that Adobe Connect supports in its Share pod and you're going to use each of them for different purposes and I'll give you some ideas about those when we take a look at them. The final one that I haven't talked about and I am going to talk about in some more detail later is the SWF or the Flash file and there is a place that you can go to get some Flash files that are very useful that you can use with Connect. So as a part of that lesson, I am going to show you both how to get them and then how to upload them into a Share pod. So these are the five file types that you typically will work with.
Most of the time frankly I am going to work with the PowerPoint, the JPEG and the PDF, but the Podcast or the MP3 file and the FLV file are also very useful, because all of these things allow you to create a different experience for your audience than just the experience of sitting and listening to you talk about PowerPoint file after PowerPoint file after PowerPoint file.