One of the options available inside of a Connect Meeting Room that can be very useful is the ability to allow participants to navigate independently through a document.

This functionality is available for PowerPoint, PDF or Flash (.swf) files when they are loaded into the Meeting Room Share Pod.  To make a document available for independent (asynchronous) navigation, uncheck the ‘Sync’ button to the bottom-right of the Share Pod.  When the ‘Sync’ button is engaged, it is a darker grey color, when the ‘Sync’ button is turned off it is a lighter color (I reiterate this as it is not always obvious to the new user of Connect)

You can load documents into the Share Pod by either drag-and-drop (if you have launched the Meeting Room using the Connect Meeting Add-in) or you can use the ‘Browse’ option from the ‘Share my Screen>’Share Documents’ dialogue.

A text document in the ‘Unsynchronized’ state can be read by all participants in the session completely independently of the others in the session so this allows you to give people the task of scanning a document or digesting it in their own time.  For the Presenter in the session, moving the document to the ‘Synchronized’ state allows them to focus on a particular passage, zoom into a diagram etc.

Of course a PDF can also be something other than text, such as a X-Ray or an architectural plan.  Although a jpeg image can be easily loaded into Connect, it will not have the ability to use the ‘zoom’ functionality we have in the PDF viewer so wherever possible you should save the jpeg as a PDF in order to get the best out of your Connect sessions.  Using the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ icons in the interface will allow the same synchronized and unsynchronized navigation as a text document, but in this case it is very useful to allow participants to see a picture on closeup for example (See Figures 1  and 2 below).

Figure 1 (Original size in a Share Pod)

Figure 2 (zoom to 200% in a Share Pod)

Recordings – Note that this capability remains available in the recording for the same duration it was made available in the live session.

Tip – I have found that if you generate the PDF using some of the third-party tools (not an Adobe tool) it is possible that the PDF will not be displayed in Connect and you will see an error upon loading.  It does seem that Connect is somewhat discerning in the type of PDF file it can successfully display.