A Nasty Little Adobe Connect Recording Issue

My team has used Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional for a few years now to provide synchronous meeting and learning opportunities in the online courses and trainings from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. I really like Connect. I think it's superior to competing products from WebEx, Wimba, Elluminate, and others. I'm a big advocate, and have spoken to numerous institutions about Connect, and was featured in an Adobe success story about Connect.

We upgraded to Connect 7 in July. The new version of the product brings to the table some significant usability enhancements, particularly in the educational environment where not everyone in the live session is going to be a "presenter" and managing temporary user abilities permissions is important. During our testing, we encountered a few problems, mostly related to UI display redraw issues, but nothing significant.

Imagine my surprise when a few weeks in to production, recordings of sessions on the Connect server began to fail. Recordings are really quite important to our online courses. Most of our students are working adults. They can't always make these live, synchronous sessions. As a result, watching the recordings is critical to absorbing the full set of content presented in the course. No recordings = a really bad thing.

What followed was a six week process of working with Adobe's support engineers on the problem. They were diligent and careful to examine many possible causes of the problem, as were we. In the end, though, it turned out to be the result of an undocumented change.

You cannot run anti-virus software on the drive where the Adobe Connect server or storage of live sessions resides.

Our server setup for Breeze Meeting (Connect 5) and Connect 6 included full virus-scanning on the entire server, and we never once encountered a problem. Anti-virus software is kind of a necessity on a Windows-based server. You'd be foolish to run without it. However, Connect 7 brought this lovely, undocumented change in to play.

You need to install Connect on a drive other than the boot drive of your server and then exclude that drive, and any drive which houses the recorded content, from anti-virus scanning. If you don't, you'll end up with broken or empty recordings of live sessions.

I've suggested to Adobe that they make this requirement clear in their documentation, but I haven't seen anything yet, so I thought I'd post it here.