What can I do to if I have issues with the Connect Add-in?

On occasion, the Connect Meeting Add-in can install incorrectly or it might be blocked at some level by your infrastructure.  You can of course do everything in Connect other than share your desktop using the basic Flash Player in a browser, but assuming are in a position where you need to share your desktop, I have outlined some options below to workaround and troubleshoot the issues.

Note – You should of course contact Adobe Support to help you through any issues and of course ensure you clear anything you do with your IT folks.

Issue with the Add-in are very rare, but on occasion it happens.  The symptoms and the process related to the Connect Meeting Add-in and the Flash Player with Connect are as follow:

  • If you have never used Connect before, when you click on a link to a Meeting Room you will be launched into the meeting in whatever browser you are using and in this case you will open the meeting using Flash Player.
  • When you enter the Meeting Room you will be prompted to install the Connect Meeting Add-in, if you choose to install the Add-in then you will leave the meeting and it will relaunch in a separate window from the browser.  You are now using the Connect Meeting Add-in.  If you are not prompted then you can select the ‘Help’ menu from your Meeting Room and then ‘Install Adobe Connect Meeting  Add-in’.
  • If when you follow the process above, the Add-in window stalls or seems to freeze (typically as a small white box) then you might need to uninstall the Add-in or troubleshoot as noted below.
  • Mac Chrome users – Note that there is an issue using the Connect Meeting Add-in with Chrome browser on a Mac.  In this case you will only be able to use the Meeting in the browser and using Flash Player unless you follow the instructions in the Tech Note here.

Open the Meeting Room in a Browser with Flash Player
First of all, if you want to use Connect in the shortest possible time (meaning ‘just make it work!’) then you can simply force your Meeting Room to open in browser and bypass the Connect Meeting Add-in.  To do this you append the text ‘?launcher=false’ to the end of your Meeting Room URL (so ‘http://abcinc.adobeconnect.com/fred’ would become ‘http://abcinc.adobeconnect.com/fred?launcher=false’).

This will bypass the Connect Meeting Add-in and just open the session in the browser using Flash Player.

Troubleshooting the Connect Meeting Add-in
Here are some options that I would walk through to potentially fix the Connect Meeting Add-in.  Please note that Adobe Support should absolutely be able to help you with this so they should be a first point of contact, but these notes may also help you.

Try some of the more obvious IT ‘have you tried turning it off and on again’ resolutions

  • Clear your browser cache exit and restart your browser.
  • Try clearing the Flash Player cache under either ‘Control Panel’>’Flash Player’ (PC) or ‘system Preferences’>’Flash Player’ (Mac), restart your browser.
  • Try another browser.

Uninstall and reinstall the Connect Meeting Add-in
In some cases the installation was corrupted somewhere along the line, so we can clean up and start again.

  1. Uninstall The Connect Meeting Add-in – you can do this in the regular way on your PC (usually ‘Uninstall or Change a Program’).  You are looking for the ‘Adobe Connect 9 Add-in’.
  2. You can now open a Meeting Room and it will open in the browser using Flash Player, you can install the Connect Meeting Add-in form the ‘Help’ menu in your Meeting Room as noted earlier in this post.
If there is still an issue then try the next process below.

Uninstall and reinstall the Connect Meeting Add-in AND Flash Player

In this case we will also clean up the Flash Player install just in case that is the issue.

  1. Uninstall The Connect Meeting Add-in – you can do this in the regular way on your PC (usually ‘Uninstall or Change a Program’).  You are looking for the ‘Adobe Connect 9 Add-in’.
  2. Uninstall Flash Player.  This is not as simple as just removing the application, to do this correctly you should use the Flash Player uninstaller here.  Note that you will need to close your browser to complete the uninstall so it is a good idea to have a copy of the instructions saved elsewhere.
  3. You can now open a Meeting Room and it will open in the browser using Flash Player, you can install the Connect Meeting Add-in from the ‘Help’ menu in your Meeting Room as noted earlier in this post.

Enable the built-in debugging feature in the Connect Meeting Add-in
You can create a log file that monitors the Connect Meeting Add-in and this log file can be very useful for the Adobe Support team in understanding what is happening with the Add-in.  The instructions on enabling the logging can be found here.
I would suggest that you create a clean Meeting Room and use this for the logging test to ensure everything is neat and tidy.
Once you have the log you can send this to Adobe Support or your technical contact and they should be able to diagnose the issue.