Sometimes you may be in a situation where you want to be able to see multiple documents and/or desktops in Connect at the same time.

The use cases for this might be that you want to view multiple PDF files to compare different plans and elevations as a part of the design project.  Similarly you might be working with multiple contractor disciplines such as heating and ventilation, electrical, plumbing etc. in a building project and you want all of the remote participants to be able to compare their designs together from their desktops.

In a teaching situation you may need to view say 4 student screens at the same time to see how people are doing and help them if necessary.

You can do this with Connect by using multiple share Pods and the process, and some best practices are below.

Note – Ensure that your users have the Connect Meeting Add-in installed.  You can do this during the session, but in case there are security issues you can pre-install the Meeting Add-in from the Test Link below:
http://na3cps.adobeconnect.com/common/help/en/support/meeting_test.htm

First, create a layout with 4 Share Pods (Figure 1).  I rename the Share Pods to let me direct the students more easily, in this case ‘Student 1, Student 2 etc.).  You can rename the pods by double-clicking on the title-bar and typing in a new name.

Figure 1

Now you will need to give your participants the right to share their desktop, and you can either make them all ‘Presenters’ in Connect, or for a little more control use the ‘Enhanced Participant Rights’ option.  Shift-select the people you want to promote and then in the ‘Attendee List Pod’ select ‘Attendee Options’>’Enhanced Participant Rights’ (Figure 2).

Note – There is some thought that you could use ‘Request Screen Share’, but I do not see a simple way to allocate a ‘Share Pod’ to an individual in that way, I think it will keep using tyhe same ‘share Pod’ over and over.

Figure 2

In the next dialogue box, you want to only add a check beside the ‘Share Pod’ option so that you are giving rights only to the ‘Share Pod’ ((Figure 3).  Close the dialogue box and all of the students you selected will not see the option to ‘Share My Screen’.

Figure 3

Allocate a ‘Share Pod’ to each student along the lines of “Ian, you take the pod titled ‘Student 1’, Robin, you take ‘Student 2′” and so on.  You could name the pods to the individual student if you wanted to make this more clear.  Now the students share their desktops or applications (see here for more details on how to share your desktop in Connect).  You as the Host will see the view in Figure 3 as they share their content back with you.  As you can see, there are separate views shared from each student.

Figure 3

One good best practice is to set the ‘Share Pods’ to uncheck the ‘Force Presenter View’ option from the ‘Attendee List Pod’>’Pod Options Menu’ (Figure 4).  This will allow you as a Host to blow up any of the pods individually to see what is being shared and not affect the other pods in the session (Figure 5).  This pod will then fill the screen (Figure 6) and you can toggle back to the multi-pod view in the same manner.

Figure 4

Figure 5

Figure 6

Remote Control – You can also help a student through the tasks at hand by clicking on the ‘Pod Options Menu’ and then selecting ‘Request Control’ on the ‘Share Pod’ in question (Figure 7).  The student will need to accept the request and then you can help them.  Of course you will want to do this in full-screen to be able to do this effectively.

Figure 7