I’ve been collaborating with a colleague in Minneapolis on new materials for The Culture of Collaboration™ Workshop. To bridge the distance gap, we’ve been using collaborative tools. One of those tools is Adobe Acrobat Connect, a subscription-based, hosted web conferencing service. Acrobat Connect is the latest incarnation of the Macromedia Breeze product, which Adobe rebranded after acquiring Macromedia in 2005. Acrobat Connect uses Adobe Flash Player, installed on roughly 97% of web browsers.

The beauty of Acrobat Connect is its simplicity. The application launches with a single click from Microsoft Office or Adobe programs. Then you’re prompted to either share your screen immediately or send an email invitation to participants. The invitation includes a URL and an audio conference number with session code.

Web conferencing is becoming more collaborative. The tool has traditionally been used for one-to-many or few-to-many presentations and training. By collaborative, I mean everybody can participate by simultaneously working on a document, spreadsheet or other program instead of one person clicking through slides while other people watch. True collaboration through web conferencing levels hierarchy by making all participants equal contributors, regardless of titles.

In Acrobat Connect, the host can decide whether to share control of the session and let others annotate material. Sharing control is often a good idea, as noted above. For more on why, check out the 10 Cultural Elements of Collaboration in The Culture of Collaboration book.

While Acrobat Connect includes a shared whiteboard with annotation tools, my colleague and I have been using the highlighters and other mark-up tools in Microsoft Word as we collaborate on The Culture of Collaboration™ Workshop materials. Incidentally, if you have a webcam and want to add videoconferencing to Acrobat Connect, that’s a single click.

One thing to watch for…Adobe has made two recent acquisitions that should ultimately enable Acrobat Connect and other Adobe programs with IM and presence (for more on presence, see my March 7, 2007 post). In January, Adobe acquired Antepo, an enterprise IM company and Amicima, a peer-to-peer networking company.