Great point Don and gracefully made. Thank you!
As you point out, I am the President of Refined Data and in the spirit of full disclosure, we are also Adobe Connect Resellers although our primary business is in software development and hosting services specifically geared to eLearning.
We are the world's leading developers of custom applications for Adobe Connect and we're the folks that Adobe themselves turn to first in situations where their clients need specialized solutions, integrations or consulting. Our products transform Connect from being yet another virtual classroom in to an extensible platform that can adapt itself to specific needs.
We started working with Moodle about 6 years ago, building integrations with Connect Virtual Classrooms and have been able to merge the two platforms so closely that students are not really even aware that they are dealing with two different solutions. You can pretty well manage everything you need in Connect directly from within Moodle, from classroom creation and scheduling to attendance tracking, fully personalized HTML email reminders with one-click, authenticated classroom entry and much more. We even take care of creating Connect user accounts and user groups and synchronize all of the invitations and permissions based on student enrollments inside of Moodle.
As we began hosting more and more Moodle sites for customers they asked us to continually add new features that were not available in the standard distribution until we had added so much functionality that I jokingly refer to Refined Training as "Son of Moodle!".
To date we have invested in excess of $600,000 on behalf of our clients (many of whom are large corporate users as well as EDU installations) - this is similar to other commercial versions of Moodle that are starting to appear. We also build out platforms that seamlessly merge Moodle, Joomla, Alfresco and Adobe Connect to create complete business solutions that are saving our clients hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to what they were doing previously.
A perfect example of "what's possible" is a project we've built called "FLEXam" - it's an application that runs inside of an Adobe Connect virtual classroom that actually reads and administers Moodle Quizzes directly from the Moodle database and runs them in a live, fully proctored environment. The proctor can see every student in real time, can communicate via text or microphone (individually or as a group) and can monitor each student's progress as they take the exam - which questions have been viewed, attempted etc. The system monitors mouse and keyboard inputs and notifies the proctor if a student resizes the screen, mouses to another application, minimizes the application, steps away from the computer etc. Students who are out of compliance can be locked out of the exam automatically or just issued a warning. All quiz answers are saved back to the Moodle database so at the end of the day, Moodle thinks the quiz was completed natively.
This is all testament to the power of Open Source software and the value that comercial services can often bring to the table to create a blended solution where clients need more than an "out-of-the-box" offering or where they would prefer to have someone else manage the platform so they can concentrate on what they do best.
I hope that helps.
Terry