The vast majority of new PCs that are available today will be pre-installed with Windows 8 and the latest version of Microsoft Office is 2013.  Here are my, surprisingly pleasant experiences so far in using the Connect tools with Windows 8 and MS Office 2013.

Adobe Connect (Meetings)
I tested access tot he Connect Central interface and using Connect Meetings on an ACER desktop with Internet Explorer 10 as my browser.

There were no issues at all running the Connect Meeting room in a browser and the installation of the Connect Meeting Add-in went without a hitch.  At this time I have really tested this in the traditional desktop browser and I did not try to start this in ‘Application/Start’ mode.

I was able to share my whole desktop and then also share the Windows 8 ‘start’ screen so it should be possible to share that interface if you are training users on the new Windows 8 setup

There is also a Knowledge Base article from Adobe on this and the link is below.  The summary is that Connect 8 and 9 work with Windows 8 right now, but that there are some enhancements coming in a dot-release of Connect 9 that will make this cleaner and wider in support for the new OS.

There will be no changes to Connect 8 to work in a better way with Windows 8.

http://helpx.adobe.com/adobe-connect/kb/windows-8-support-connect-8.html

Adobe Presenter 8
This can be a little confusing as the Adobe Presenter System Requirements state that you cannot use Adobe Presenter with Windows 8 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 (see here).  That said, I also found a Blog Post from Adobe that states that Adobe Presenter 8.1 will work with MS PowerPoint 2013 (see here).  It does state that you will require Adobe Presenter 8.1 so be sure to download the latest version from the trial link below.

I installed the latest version of Adobe Presenter as a trial and my initial attempt failed with an error along the lines of ‘Microsoft PowerPoint 64-Bit was not detected, Adobe Presenter required Microsoft PowerPoint 64-Bit’.  I downloaded the 32-Bit version of Adobe Presenter (which is in fact just named ‘English | Windows | 874.4 MB’ in the list) and this installed without issue (See Figure 1 below).  I opened PowerPoint and went through some rudimentary tests and everything works as expected, actually, technically, I guess it does not work ‘as expected’ as I fully expected this to be a fail…cool!

Figure 1

You can download the trial version of Adobe Presenter for your testing from here.  (Note that you will need to login using your Adobe ID and password)

Note related to MS PowerPoint 2010 – From my initial research it does seem that PowerPoint 2010 will run on Windows 8 in 32-Bit mode, in theory that would mean that Adobe Presenter would also run on that version in Windows 8, but I have not tested this and it is unlikely I will be able to as PowerPoint 2010 is not easy to find now that MS Office 2013 is the latest version

Adobe Captivate 6
Adobe Captivate is listed as working with Windows 8 according to the System Requirements (here) and I was able to install the tool without any issues and run some rudimentary tests and captures.  Nothing out of the ordinary in my tests.

Overall the experience with MS Windows 8 and the Connect tools seems to all be good so far