What is your process for solving or diagnosing an Adobe Connect issue?

Posted on by ianjustingetconnect

There are always problems with any software solution, Adobe Connect is no different.  In this Blog Post I am hoping to outline the sort of diagnostic process I carry out myself and the way to contact Adobe Support, and then escalate.

For the sake of this post we are going to focus on Connect Meetings and Connect Events.

If you wish, just contact Adobe Support immediately and start there (details on contact Adobe Support are shown here, you should already have this information from your on-boarding documents).  You can still work through the options below and cancel the ticket if you find a solution.

Please also consider speaking to your GetConnect account Executive to gain access to the free GetConnect Training Suite (10+ hours of recorded training on all modules and roles in Connect) and the GetConnect PDF Getting Started Guides (detailed graphically rich guides on using Connect Meetings and Connect Events).  You may find that the information in these courses and documents can save you having issues in the first place.

Personally, before calling Adobe Support, I prefer to check out a few things myself.

Search the Web…thoughtfully
The first thing is to actually pay attention to the message you are seeing or the symptoms and see what you can find out there in the world of Google.  Try searching for the specific message, copy and paste it into a Google search word for word and prefix it with ‘adobe connect’.

If your issue is not displaying a specific error message, try to search as simplistically as possible.  For example, I have seen issues with the Mac Mavericks operating system, so a first attempt at a search on ‘adobe connect mavericks’ takes me here.  One of the links on the results page links to the Adobe Connect Blog post here and this tells me that Mavericks is not fully supported yet for Connect and that there are performance and stability, it also linked me to an issue with Safari.  I am not suggesting this solves my issue, it does tell me that I might try another browser and for the time being I might not want to rely on Mavericks as my Connect workhorse.

I have found this simple task to be incredibly helpful when I am trying to solve an issue for myself or for a client.

If you want to look at specific resources, here is my list of the most helpful self-service support tools:

Adobe Connect Help Blog
http://help.sset.jhu.edu/pages/viewrecentblogposts.action?key=Connect

Ian Justin’s Connect Blog
http://allthingsadobeconnect.blogspot.ca/

Connect Users (tutorials, forums etc.)
http://www.connectusers.com/

Try to Narrow Down the Issue
The next thing to do is to try to identify the specific issue and to narrow it down as much as possible.  This might help you solve this yourself and certainly it will help Adobe Support determine where the issue resides.  If I can isolate a problem and find a workaround it allows me to work while Adobe Support handles the original issue in the ‘background’.

Failed Meeting Rooms – If you are having a problem with a Connect meeting failing to start, consider these options before contacting support:

  • Use the meeting test link here to see if this sheds any light on your issue (this will tell you if you have the right Flash Player version, if the Add-in is installed etc.)
  • Try another meeting room (this will tell you if the issues is common to your account or isolated to a specific room)
  • Try another browser (some browsers have security settings that can interfere with Connect, sometimes a browser just isn’t going to play nicely with Connect today)
  • Restart your browser and try again (restarting a browser often fixes an issue, particularly related to logins or cached information)
  • Try another machine (If it works on another machine you have potentially isolated the issue to your machine)
  • Try rebooting the machine and try again (rebooting can fix registry issues, and of course it meets the first request of any support call for anything, anywhere!)
  • If you have time, try another network (for example test from home, often it can be an IT setting that is blocking or compromising Connect)
  • Use the port test link here to see if any of the tests fail (this test determines how well Connect is communicating with your computer.  If one or more test fails it can compromise performance and potentially compromise the meeitng room)

Bandwidth and Performance – If you are having problems related to slowness of the meeting room such as your camera being delayed or audio being out of sync, consider these options before contacting support:

  • Ensure you are not connected to a VPN (this essentially compresses the signals and routes them through a smaller pipe to secure them, but it can also have disastrous performance consequences)
  • Use the port test link here to see if any of the tests fail (this test determines how well Connect is communicating with your computer.  If one or more test fails it can compromise performance and potentially compromise the meeting room).  Note that Connect should ideally be communicating through port 1935 for the best performance, otherwise Connect will use port 443.  If your account is set to use SSL for all meetings, you will always communicate through port 443
  • Check the ‘Room Bandwidth’ setting in the Connect preferences panel.  Try taking it down from LAN to DSL and se if this helps your performance issues.  One configuration to avoid in my opinion is ‘LAN’ for room bandwidth and the highest setting for the camera.  In my tests this adds a disproportionate bandwidth to the room and might grind it to a halt.  Set the camera quality ‘one-notch’ down from the highest setting if you have your room bandwidth set to LAN
  • Check your PC CPU: usage.  In some cases, a graphically intensive or CPU intensive application can simply ‘starve’ the Connect meeitng room of resources and it will slow down of freeze.  Close down any unnecessary applications prior to running your meeting
  • Consider the bandwidth you are taking for your meeting room.  You can tell how much bandwidth is being used by clicking on the green vertical button to the top-right of your meeting room.  Add the ‘Up’ and ‘Down’ numbers together and you will have an average number for the bandwidth.  If you are over 1mbits/s (over 1,000 kbits/s) then you might be sending more than your audience connections can handle.  Lower the room bandwidth or use less streaming data.
  • Be conscious or the number of camera feeds you are using.  I have a detailed post here that discusses the bandwidth taken by cameras.
  • Be conscious of the number of audio feeds you are using.  If you have 10 microphones enabled and 10 people are un-muted and able to talk, you are sending 10 feeds.  Irrespective of whether they are talking or not, they are sending ‘silence’.  If you see issues with audio and bandwidth, consider using ‘Single Speaker Mode’ or enabling only microphones as they are needed (in conjunction with the raise-hand features for example.  You can see more details on using voice in Connect in my blog post here.
    If all of the things above fail you, or if you find a workaround and still want to solve the issue, then you should log a ticket with Adobe Support here.

    Issues with Email – With the success of Connect Events, these issues tend to be more common and they can be tough to track down, but in my experience, assuming that Connect is not sending emails correctly is in most cases not going to address the problem.  The challenge is that there are a lot of ‘moving parts’ that can stop and email getting to you, so here are a few things to consider.
    One thing to consider is that is is very unlikely that the Connect email server will selectively send mails only to certain people.  If some people receive emails and some people do not receive emails from an event, it is very likely that the issue lies with the settings of the individual’s email servers and SPAM/Junk filters and not with Connect.

    • Is the Connect Event ‘live’? – Check that you have ‘Published’ your event in Connect Events.  Until you publish the event, emails will not be sent.
    • Pre-test the emails – Before running the event and before publishing it, use the ‘send test email’ option in Connect Events at the bottom of the email list.  You should see the emails with a few seconds.
    • Should an Email have been sent? – Many of the settings in Connect Events emails rely on a trigger in Connect.  You will not see a ‘thank you for attending’ email unless you attended the session.  Ensure that you are using the right email template for the task.
    • SPAM – Check your SPAM or junk mail folders, see if the mail is being redirected to that location.
    • ‘Stopped at the Border’ – In many cases, your IT folks may stop emails sent using your email to your email.  In the case of a Connect Events, you may be the hows of the event and sending yourself a test email.  This can be seen by your IT security systems as an attempt to ‘spoof’ and a security compromise.  IT should be able to confirm if this is the case.  You have the option to create one or more email aliases in Connect Events that allow you to have these emails sent ‘from’ a different address and this may solve the challenge.
    • Mail Server is Blocked – Your IT folks may also block email coming from an unknown email server.  If this is the case, log a ticket with Adobe Support to get the IP address of the mail servers for your cluster and then give these to your IT folks and they may be willing to open up the system to incoming mails from those IP addresses.
    • Change the ‘From’ Address on the Connect Account – This applies to general emails being sent from Connect, but it is possible to change the format of the emails at the Connect Account side to be more acceptable to your IT infrastructure.  Information on this is here and this needs to be requested by you though Adobe Support (and of course check with your IT folks as well).

    Issues with Login to the System – On occasion, your users may forget or mistype their password and then need to reset their information.  If your IT setup does not allow for mails from Connect to be sent internally (see above) then you might need to fix things yourself at the Admin level:

    • No ‘Forgot my Password’ Email – When a person resets their password from the main Connect login screen, it will send a reset message to that person’s email address.  Before escalating the issue to Adobe Support, check SPAM and Junk folders.
    • Reset the Password as the Admin – I guarantee that it is quicker to reset the password yourself than to get this resolved by Adobe Support.  To reset or change the password as an Admin, follow one of these options:
      • Send a link to reset this user’s password – In this case a link will be sent to the user’s email to reset the password, but if the mails are not getting through this is not going to help you so consider the option below as well.  The email will likely be sent from ‘[email protected]’ or something along these lines.
      • Set a temporary password – Go to ‘Administration’>’Users and Groups’, select a name from the list and ‘Information’.  From the tab ‘User Information’, scroll to the bottom of the page and select ‘Set temporary password for this user’.  You can either email this 4 character password to the user and let them login, they will be prompted to change the password on first login and they will be set.  If you want to create a new password for the user, you login with their email and the temporary password and then set them a new password yourself.  Both of these methods avoid an email being sent by Adobe Connect to the user that might get lost or stopped.
    • Wrong Connect Account – Check to see whether the user is logging into the wrong account, maybe an existing trial account or an account for another client or partner such as the GetConnect Training Suite.  You cannot be logged into 2 different accounts with the same browser so on occasion this will seem like the login is broken, but in fact you are just logging into the wrong account.

    Capacity or Permissions in Rooms
    Sometimes you will see errors that are showstoppers because you cannot get the expected capacity in your meeting or seminar rooms.  Here are the things to consider checking as well as (or before) contacting Adobe Support:

    • ‘Seminar Room’ only has capacity of 1 attendee – You have probably built your room under the ‘Meetings’ tab.  When you have a Seminar Room license you are also given 1 Concurrent Attendee license under the Meetings tab so that you can build meeting room templates.  either rebuild the room under your Seminar License (‘Seminars’ tab, then ‘Seminar Rooms and select your license.  Build the room there.  If you have already committed a lot of time to the room, move it to the ‘Shared Templates’ folder and then clone a new seminar room from that template.
    • Seminar Room only allows 10 attendees – Your Seminar Room is in ‘standby-mode’ and it is not using the full seminar license.  You need to either being an ‘Instant Session form the top-right of the seminar room *provided* your seminar license is not being used by another person on your account.
    • Everyone in the room is demoted to ‘Participant’ – You have a Named Organizer’ licensing setup and there is no user in the ‘Meeting Hosts’ group in your meeitng room.  If a legitimate Host (member of the Meeting Hosts group) leaves the meeting room, after 5 minutes the population will all be demoted to Participant level.