With Acrobat Connect Professional, we provide licensed customers the ability to define their own list of stampers that can be used on the whiteboard in an Acrobat Connect Professional meeting. For instance, a particular client may want to use military symbols for whiteboarding and collaboration; another client may want to use medical symbols, geographical symbols, or any other kind of symbol that is specific to their organization or industry.

Acrobat Connect Professional provides on-premise customers such customizability, even allowing customers to organize their stampers or symbols in folders and subfolders in the whiteboad tool.

This article describes how someone could create their own stampers and use them in Acrobat Connect Professional.

Note: This capability is available only for on-premise deployments.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional

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Flash MX 2004

Note: The source code and steps listed in this article require Flash MX 2004 to work. The steps and source code are not compatible with Flash 8 or later versions. If you have both Flash MX 2004 and a later version of Flash installed, you will need to uninstall the later version so that you only have Flash MX 2004 running on the computer you are using.

Sample files:

custom_stamper_sample.zip (ZIP, 17K)

How stampers are used

Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the whiteboard tool for selecting a symbol in Acrobat Connect Professional.

Figure 1. Selecting a symbol in Acrobat Connect Professional

Once a symbol is selected, it can be dropped on the whiteboard just like the default stampers that ship with the product (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Dropping a customer stamper on the whiteboard

Creating a custom stamper library

Step 1. Create a Flash file like the one in this mockup (see Figure 3).

Note: We recommend using Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 because the Menu components changed in Flash 8.

Figure 3. Mockup of a Flash file for a custom stamper

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Note: This file is called StamperSymbols.fla but the name of your FLA is up to you. However, the published file must be named StamperSymbol.swf.

There is only one symbol on the Stage, called StamperSymbols. The linkage properties for this symbol appear in Figure 4.

Figure 4. StamperSymbols linkage properties

The actual symbols can be called whatever you want, but their linkage properties should be as depicted in Figure 5.

Figure 5. General linkage properties

Step 2. Create a StamperSymbol.as file that looks like the one included in the sample files.

Notice that the syntax follows that of the Flash Menu component—which is well documented—and allows for hierarchical menus.

Each entry needs to have a label (which gets shown in our menu) and an icon to go with that label. The icon corresponds to the linkage name of the symbol, as specified in the FLA.

One entry must have an isDefault:true value to tell Adobe Connect Professional that it should choose that symbol as the default symbol.

Another guideline for symbols is to size them around 20 x 20 pixels.

Note: If you want part of your symbol to be colored by the color picker, then turn that part into a movie clip and give it the instance name bg. Acrobat Connect Professional will color it based on the whiteboard color selection.

Step 3. Publish the StamperSymbol.swf file and copy it to the /breeze/appserv/web/common/meeting/shell/ folder, right next to the other SWFs.

The meeting will load that file upon startup. After you update the file, there's no need to reload the server. Just exit the meeting and then enter it again. The new symbols will appear.

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