Adobe is offering a familiar service … for free!

Anyone who has used Adobe Connect to host live meetings on the Internet knows that it is a powerful tool for screen sharing, file sharing, marking up documents, chatting, taking notes, and interacting with audio and video. Adobe is now offering this service for free for up to three participants at a time.

Simply sign up for a free account to get started. The meeting interface is fairly intuitive, but Adobe does provide documentation to help you use and troubleshoot ConnectNow.

You will be assigned a personal online meeting room with a permanent URL that you can share with others, and your attendees are not required to sign up for an account. They can enter the meeting as a guest.

You’ll be able to share your screen and still access key meeting features like the attendees list, chat session, shared notes, and webcam controls.

You can hold video conferences with Adobe’s multipoint video functionality.

Use the chat pod to send messages to one or both of the other participants. The chat pod even supports some rich text formatting features.

With the whiteboard features, you will be able to collaboratively mark up documents and even save the results as a PNG file.

For audio, you may use a microphone for VoIP or a conference number provided by Adobe for traditional teleconferencing.

You can promote attendees to presenters and allow them to share their screens. You can even take remote control of another person’s computer.

Have you used Adobe Connect or ConnectNow?  How does it compare to other web conferencing tools you may have used?  What are your recommendations?