Adobe Connect - hosted vs installed

[Charis Kelly]

When it comes to Connect what are the advantages of a hosted system vs installed system? I am currently looking at Connect for my company mainly for the Training portion and clean integration with Captivate. It is clear that a hosted system can be up and in operation a lot quicker than something installed behind our firewall, but what benefits are there to having it installed?

[Matt Lee]

Hi Charis
Sorry for the slow reply, but the service provider we use to host our forums had an outage this afternoon so our site was down for awhile. I'm sure Jonathan will chime in with more information, but I thought I would respond with a few insights. I don't think the rollout time between hosted and licensed is that significantly different. You may be restrained by your internal IT resources as far as scheduling, but the actual product is identical. Most companies make the ultimate decision based on price and whether or not their total cost of ownership will be reduced by buying a licensed deployment. There are other reasons, but I'll let Jonathan address those as he is our in house expert on the product.

[Jonathan Turkle]

Hi Charis: There are three main reasons to consider a licensed Connect solution over a hosted solution.

1. Economics - If your total first year Connect deployment is much less than $15 or $20 K, then an ASP version may be bets suited to your needs. The ROS on a licensed system usually shows up by year two or three or your organization's ownership. Usually, The larger the deployment, The sooner the ROI.

2. Performance and stability - owning a licensed version of connect means that your organization will have more control over the performance of the product. Rather than sharing a space on Adobe's servers with hundreds of other accounts and thousands of users, a licensed version of connect is isolated on your own servers away from any major performance issue caused by high demand on the hosted servers.

Server updates on an ASP (hosted) account can be a little daunting as most updates are never tested under real life load conditions. There are usually a few hiccups along the way before things get smoothed out have on the ASP account as is the case with most any ASP account. Sometimes this is minor and sometimes, in the case with Connect 7, this can cause more than a few headaches. Fortunately Adobe is usually quick to respond, and now Connect 7 is fairly well stabilized. When work with a licensed account, we usually recommend that a the customer wait a month or two before upgrading their connect software to allow Adobe time to smooth out the rough edges on the ASP side first with whatever patches need to be made, and then make the transition to the next version.

3. Extensibility – The ASP version has a limited amount of extensibility as Adobe has to keep certain access to the server locked off for the security of the other accounts and because they have to keeps some conformity for all their users. The licensed version provides a customer with a higher level of access under the hood of the software enabling a greater degree of integration with the customers other systems. Where as ASP account must rely on web services to drill down through the API to retrieve data from the Connect server, customers with a licensed deployment, have direct access to the Connect database for a much faster more efficient systems integration.

One reason many customers forgo the advantages of a licensed account is because they often just don’t feel they have the in-house resources to manage the connect server with up-dates, patches and back-ups. There is a hybrid approach that we offer at Envisiontel, which allows customers own the software and have us install, manage or host their licensed version of Connect on our servers. We currently do this for several customers, whop want the advantage of a licensed deployment but don’t have the in-house resources to host software on their own. Please feel free to give me a call should you have any other questions about these options. I hope this was helpful.

[Charis Kelly]

Hi Jonathan;

I apologize for not replying sooner - the "email me when people reply" feature did not work so I was not aware of your response till i received a voicemail from Michael. I enjoyed the presentation you gave on captivate and I learned quite a bit but wished you spent some more time on the reporting capabilites of the system.

Thank you for the information above; you have given me quite a few things to consider that had not occured to me before. It is also great that you offer the option of a licensed deployment for those who do not have the in house resources.