Macromedia Breeze

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.

Author: Nik Rawlinson