Product Reviews

Breeze: more than a product, it's a piece of very clever branding, summing up the simplicity of Macromedia's new communications tool. It's an online service designed to fulfil three specific tasks: hosting online meetings, training staff and presenting PowerPoint over the Web.

It's the first of those tasks that's the most impressive, and it's the best example yet of the single-screen web app abilities of Flash MX. Logging into your Breeze account allows you to set up a meeting room, invite specific participants and set a time when the room should be open. Online attendees receive an email containing a link to the room, which opens in any Flash-enabled browser. The room layout is determined by the meeting administrator, and populated by a series of 'pods'. If you have specific needs, you can build your own, but the default set, which includes chat windows, whiteboards and file repositories, caters for pretty much most circumstances.

Data can be shared by all users, and if you've got a webcam connected to your PC or Mac you can use it to videoconference inside a dedicated pod. Combining these features with the ability to host an online file repository actually makes meeting this way far more convenient than a face-to-face meet-up, where you invariably forget to bring along an important document, or have to dash out to run off extra copies.

Meeting administrators can decide how the room should look, with all participant windows rearranging themselves in the remote browsers to mirror what's going on in the administrator's view. Anyone who takes umbrage at this can use the private chat feature to complain about it with other users behind the administrator's back.

Best of all, because they're Flash runtime applications, Breeze meeting rooms are platform agnostic. We did all our testing in Internet Explorer and Firefox on a PC, and shared meeting rooms with a Mac running Safari, even sharing the Windows Desktop so that the Mac user could watch Windows Media Player visualisations.

Having signed up for a Breeze account, you can download the PowerPoint plug-in, which contains a wizard for turning your presentations into a fully automated online broadcast. Having saved your existing series of slides, simply run the wizard and narrate

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a commentary for each slide. Breeze then uploads the presentation to your online account and converts it into a Flash movie.

Anyone who plays it back has the option of turning on your PowerPoint presenter notes, which appear as a semi-transparent overlay and act as subtitles for the presentation. An overview panel lets them skip back and forth through the presentation, and a progress bar shows how far they're through each stage of the presentation.

To get the best use out of the PowerPoint publishing plug-in you have to pause between each slide; it's no good recording a flowing narrative and clicking for a slide change as you continue to speak, as you'll lose a word or two during the transition. Unless handled well, this can make things come across a little stilted, but as most viewers would like a moment of silence to digest the new slide, it's little hardship.

It goes beyond simple navigation, though, as the Breeze wizard allows you to embed surveys and quizzes in your PowerPoint presentation. These can consist of multiple-choice or survey questions, and each will present the participant with a score and feedback at the end of the quiz. More importantly, the results are stored inside your secure Breeze account, allowing you to monitor how many questions are being answered correctly, or gather the results of your surveys.

The overall effect of surveying in this way feels very professional, and as the on-screen presentation can take on your corporate house-style through the use of whichever PowerPoint template you prefer, it looks like you've spent money on scripting your own web application.

Breeze is very much an enterprise-level application, which aims to cut down on your corporate travel and administration costs. As such, you'll have to do some careful maths to determine whether the asking price is going to be offset by the cost-savings it delivers.

Two versions are available - the hosted service we tested, in which each of your presentations and meetings is hosted on Macromedia's own servers, or the licensed server edition, which can be deployed behind a corporate firewall. System requirements for hosting meetings on the latter configuration are fairly hefty, starting out with a Pentium 4 and at least 1GB of free drive space. A further 80GB of free space is recommended for hosting live content, such as files uploaded to the library.

Every so often, you find a product so easy to use it's a joy to review, and that's what we have here. With nothing more than a brief flick through the documentation, you'll be producing some impressive presentations using the PowerPoint plug-in, and you can be up and running online meetings less than two minutes after you first log on. We tried very hard to come up with something we don't like about Breeze, and besides the asking priced, we failed.