Adobe’s exciting new eLearning Suite

 

RJ Jacquez, Senior Product Evangelist at Adobe, brought exciting news about Adobe’s latest eLearning Suite.  At February’s STC meeting, Jacquez gave an information-packed presentation on some of the suite’s newest features. RJ has presented Adobe products to our chapter several times in the past few years. Each presentation has had a high “wow” factor. This month’s presentation was no exception.

 

“I’m the evangelist for this particular suite,” said Jacquez with a grin.  “In this suite you’ll find unique products you won’t find anywhere else.”

 

The new Adobe eLearning Suite includes:

                                                                                             

·         Adobe Captivate 4

·         Adobe Flash CS4

·         Adobe Presenter 7

·         Adobe Dreamweaver CS4

·         Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended

·         Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro

·         Adobe Soundbooth CS4

·         Adobe Bridge CS4

·         Adobe AIR

 

Jacquez highlighted a few of the new suite’s programs, including Adobe AIR, a system runtime for developers. Prominent among its features are cross-platform capability,
built-in Flash, and the ability to “talk” to web services. Attendees were surprised to learn that in the past year there have been 100 million Adobe AIR installs.  “We want it to be as ubiquitous as Flash,” said Jacquez.

 

Audience members were also impressed with the capabilities of ConnectNow, a browser-independent feature that is built into Adobe products.  ConnectNow allows users to share computer screens. “People in tech support are using ConnectNow to help people fix their computers,” Jacquez said. 

 

The new features of FrameMaker 9 generated several questions at the meeting.  It has a CS4-like user interface and it supports 3-D animated models in PDF files. “We brought FrameMaker to the 21st century!” exclaimed Jacquez.  “It now looks and behaves like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and InDesign … We believe we can help technical communicators revolutionize the way they create technical documents and how their customers consume them….PDFs are no longer static and boring.  They are dynamic and exciting.  These PDFs are personalized, highly-interactive experiences, not static text,” Jacquez said. 

 

To get more information on Adobe’s new eLearning Suite, visit

http://www.adobe.com/products/elearningsuite/?promoid=EHEEC or read RJ Jacquez’s blog at http://blogs.adobe.com/rjacquez/.