Tom Mollerus' Weblog

Our marketing department has often wished that they could make two improvements to our Connect webinar process: first, that we could somehow get an automatic list of who attends the Connect session; and second, that our users didn't have to log in to the Connect session in the first place. Right now, you have to enter your name in the login form before you are allowed into the webinar.

So I did a little looking around in the Connect login form, and I found that the URL that the user is redirected to after using the form is in the format http://yoursubdomain.acrobat.com/[webinar name]?guestname=[user's name]. Now that we know what Connect is expecting, we can instead link to ColdFusion code which tracks the webinar attendance in a database, then redirect the user to the Connect webinar that we generate ourselves.

So, now that's the exact kind of link that we embed in our webinar invitation emails. For instance, if the Acme company had a webinar named '2009-Products' and it was sending an invitation to Jane Prospect, it would embed the URL http://www.acme.com/webinar.cfm?webinar=2009-Products&guestname=Jane%20Prospect, record her as an attendee in our database, then redirects the user to the webinar at http://acme.acrobat.com/2009-Products?guestname=Jane%20Prospect. Both goals accomplished.