Acrobat Connect is designed to facilitate spontaneous, ad-hoc Web conferencing. It offers personal, always-on meeting rooms for which users can choose their own address, much as they would choose an e-mail address. Accessing a personal meeting room requires little more than a Web browser and the Adobe Flash Player software, which is installed on more than 97 percent of Internet-connected computers.

The entry-level Acrobat Connect hosted service provides users with collaboration tools such as screen sharing, whiteboarding, chat, videoconferencing, and audio conferencing. Users can launch the service directly from a document, using the new “Start Meeting” access built into Acrobat 8 and Adobe Reader 8 software.

For more advanced conferencing and collaboration, Acrobat Connect Professional offers meeting management capabilities and a reporting system. Users can hold online meetings with as many as 2,500 participants, complete with interactive multimedia, integrated telephony, and VoIP. Meeting rooms can be customized with tailored meeting flows and branded content, meetings can be archived for later viewing, and content can be shared across meetings. Companies can even build interactive applications for their meeting rooms.