Macromedia Breeze

A flexible and easy-to-use tool, but far too expensive for many.

Price: £18000

Manufacturer: Macromedia

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Verdict

Pros:
Flexible meeting tool; zero installation for most users.

Cons:
Expensive.

Overall:
An easy-to-use way of managing presentations, training and meetings, but far too expensive for many companies to consider.

Nigel Whitfield, Personal Computer World 30 Jul 2004

Macromedia is best known for web tools such as Dreamweaver, Flash and Coldfusion. Breeze, its collaboration tool, is more of a service. At its simplest, it provides a means of delivering presentations over the Internet, but it adds tools such as tracking of who's viewed what, and enables the addition of quizzes or feedback surveys with the associated collation of results. The training module allows presentations and quizzes to be grouped, recording results, sending reminders to participants and keeping track of who has achieved a pass mark in the tests. The final module, Breeze Live, is a full-on collaborative working system, allowing conferencing with live video, chat rooms, whiteboard and even application.

What sets Breeze apart from something like Netmeeting is that it's all done with Flash. According to Macromedia, the player is installed on around 98 per cent of web browsers, which means most people can participate in meetings or take online courses without any software installation, whether a Mac or Windows user. Creating material, though, does rely on Windows, Powerpoint and a Breeze plug-in, which can be downloaded from the website.

The simplest element of Breeze is the presentation system, which is priced according to the number of content creators. They use Powerpoint with a plug-in that makes it simple to upload finished work to the Breeze hosting site. You can work through a presentation adding narration as you go, or import a recording and add it. However, it's best to add timing markers with Soundforge; setting them for a whole talk in the Breeze plug-in is a little fiddly. Once you've added sound, the whole presentation is sent to the Breeze site, where it can be played back using Flash.

Via the web interface, you can create users, notify them of presentations to watch, see who's viewed them and assign different permissions to groups of users. You can also group presentations together to form a course. And to save having to create lots of users, it's possible to enable self-registration, so people can sign up online.

A course is more than just sitting through presentations, though. The plug-in for Powerpoint allows you to create quizzes, which are sequences of slides with questions. You can have multiple choice, or yes/no-style questions. They can be added to a presentation as a survey or used to test people on the content of a course.

In the latter case, you can assign points to correct answers and set a pass mark, and the system will keep track of who's succeeded, generating a certification number for the lucky ones. It can also send reminders to people who have not finished a course. All pretty neat and you can set it up without even needing to read the manual. This module is priced by the number of concurrent learners.

The final element, Breeze Live, is priced by the number of people simultaneously attending meetings. It's essentially a sort of Flash version of Netmeeting, with presentations, whiteboard, live video and audio from the presenter, text chat, file sharing and application sharing - you can even have Mac users watching what's happening on the screen of a PC. There's a separate chat area for presenters only, and you can send private messages to other participants, by group or individually. It's a useful tool and, once again, it will be no hassle to set up since all it needs is the Flash player on the attendees' computers.

Other handy touches include the ability to customise the log-in screens people use for the system, so they'll see your logo instead of Macromedia's, and downloadable report files - particularly handy for the training module, so you can see which issues people aren't getting to grips with.

But - and it's a big but - this isn't a cheap product. The starting price puts it out of reach of small firms and seems a lot to pay for hosting a presentation; check out the July Hands on Web development for an alternative - not as slick, but cheaper than £18,000 for a Powerpoint plug-in. In terms of the meeting facilities, too, there are other alternatives, such as First Virtual's Click to meet.

Breeze is pretty neat; the web interface could do with some polishing, but it does the job. It's marred, though, by the rapaciously greedy pricing.

Contact: Macromedia
www.macromedia.com/uk

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