It maybe summer, Q4 is a distant memory, however I wanted to take some time to reflect on the past few months. From an area of growth and re-alignment. Yes its been busy from a product development perspective, but it has also been busy across the business from service to project delivery, you can read more about that in Tim’s recent post. For the purpose of this post I wanted to focus on product deliverables that have made a difference, so here goes.
As we are well into the new year and Q1 we have already made a significant leap forward in some product thinking and direction, and more features will be available later in the year, check back for more info on that soon. Anyway, with over 100 clients we are always receiving great ideas on how to improve Connect – the list below is just a few of the updates available to clients. However, rest assured the roadmap is in great shape and there will be some exciting new features coming out soon.
Here are my top 5 new features (in no particular order):
1. Webcaster ‘remote’ : Messenger / Test-live With the setup of Connect webcaster is installed for the capture and streaming of video content, we know that sometimes the operation of webcaster is time consuming and resource hungry. We have development a tablet application that allows the user to sit anywhere within the meeting space (as long as it is within the wifi range) and control many of the main functions of webcaster. This combined with camera to microphone automation gives the ultimate flexibility of control. 
2. Automatic twitter alerting
You can now set up automatic alerts within the admin area of your Connect site, this is a great new feature that allows clients to set up tweets to their chosen twitter followers list (account). I hear you saying, yeah but that easy…! It is easy, but now as part of your booking workflow you can add tweets to be sent out per agenda point, on starting live, on archive etc. It radically improves the engagement potential of the content and pulls listeners in to watch specific and key areas of the meeting.
3. Webcaster ‘anywhere’
I mentioned above the ease and flexibly of use with webcaster ‘remote’ – well webcaster ‘anywhere’ gives content providers even more scope to capture meetings and content that would otherwise be impossible. Opening up the meeting space even further direct to your Connect site. Webcaster ‘anywhere’ is a simple to use software application installed and run on any laptop with any camera as your capture device. Think leaders briefings, elections, internal training sessions etc etc. Capture more content with the same added value that Connect brings.
4. Presentation upload : .PDF / .PPT
Presentations play a key role with many webcasts, how these presentations are viewed and prepared has evolved over time, one of the main strategies for Connect is to bring the offline meeting online, so ensuring the viewer has the same experience of viewing the presentation as viewers in the meeting space is crucial. We have the automatic slide feature available to all clients, but if this isn’t possible then we wanted to make it as easy as possible to upload your presentation to the webcast. We have introduced automatic upload of both .PDF and .PPT files from the CMS.
5. Connect PAYG : (Pay As You Go)
Welcome to our new payment model, we have introduced a brand new PAYG pricing feature to allow new clients to benefit from all the amazing features of Connect on a pay-as-you-go option. If you want to find out more please click here.
