Review: Macromedia Breeze 4.1

You design your presentation in the ordinary fashion, then click the Breeze menu to add sound or Flash movies. Tools include a wizard to walk you through the process of setting your microphone, adding your soundtrack, and publishing the presentation to the Breeze Web site. More advanced users can skip the wizard and access each of these commands from the Breeze menu. The tools are easy to use and intuitive, although publishing to the Breeze site takes longer than I would like, and after you publish, you need to wait while Breeze converts the file to Flash. They send an email informing you when the file is ready. I would prefer to see a smoother, more integrated process here.

You also have the option of saving your presentation as FlashPaper, a concept Macromedia introduced last year to provide an easy way to integrate content such as a PowerPoint presentation into a Web page as a Flash object. You simply click the Convert to Macromedia Flash command and Breeze does the rest, converting the file to a Flash (swf) file for you automatically. You can then embed this into a Web page, providing a way for people to view the presentation at their convenience any place they have access to the Web.

The administrative tools provide a way to manage users and groups, view reports, and set up meetings and courses (see Figure 2 below). You can also manage files such as the PowerPoint presentations that you upload to Breeze, and you can send emails to users informing them of meetings or of new presentations on the Breeze site. The administrative tools are not as nicely designed as those in Contribute (another Macromedia Web publishing product), and I found myself easily getting lost without clear directions on how to get back where I started.

This review really only scratches the surface of what Breeze can do, including white-board technology for online meetings, the ability to control applications remotely—very useful in instructor-led training—and the ability to add test questions and monitor the results, which is useful for Web-based training courses without an instructor.

Another feature that bears mention is Breeze's mutable user interface. You can pick and choose from a variety of preset windows and lay them out in whatever manner you wish, even adding and subtracting windows as a presentation is going on. These windows include—but aren't limited to—chat boxes, polls, and videos. By employing a Flash designer, you can create custom-built windows based on the rich multimedia capabilities of Flash, including interactive 3D models.

If you are looking for an online meeting tool with powerful features and extensibility, you should give Breeze a try. It’s not perfect by any means, but it provides a host of features you won’t find in similar tools, and for a very reasonable price.