Adobe/Macromedia has just announced this past Monday the newest release of Macromedia Breeze, its flagship product for real-time web conferencing, online collaboration, live presentations and distance training.

Breeze 5 is from my point of view another wonderfully designed masterpiece of interface design, usability and features.

I don't see any of the other key enterprise conferencing systems coming close to what Breeze is now able to offer. Though competing products may have key strengths in specific areas, in an overall roundup of what I personally like and value as being representative of future directions, Breeze stands out as a pretty unbeatable winner.

Here is why:

Like no-one Breeze leverages the ubiquitous presence of Flash inside all major browsers and operating systems to guarantee seamless cross-platform compatibility, something only a handful of its competitors have been able to provide, and often with some compromises.

The new release of Breeze refines on the already outstanding feature set and adds a few "nice-to-have" extras including multi-course curriculum management, multi-point video conferencing, full-screen video, enhanced tracking and reporting, and expanded question and quiz types.

For those of you who haven't used Breeze before, the core list of facilities of this tool is quite impressive as it includes everything from text chat, polling, whiteboard and file sharing to automatic conversion of PowerPoint presentations into Flash and online delivery, co-browsing, application sharing, voice over IP, multi-point video, integrated recording, event and user tracking/reporting.

But what is rather more impressive as soon as you start using Breeze is the flexibility and ease with which one can manage, tailor and personalize the interface and the collaboration components utilized in multitude of ways.

Breeze employs these handy floating panel called "pods", which are basically standard resizable floating windows that can be "filled" or rather activated to perform specific tasks: a new whiteboard, a note area, a file sharing session, etc.

Kevin Lynch Executive, Macromedia Vice President and Chief Software Architect and Robin Good while demoing Breeze 5

Any customized combination of pods can be saved by Breeze and given a layout name so that it can be re-used for other sessions. No other tool comes close to user interface customization as Breeze does.

The user interface has been further refined, to be even more swift, intelligent, and unintrusive. I think the UI and usability teams at Macromedia did once again an excellent job of this, with the new subtle refinements helping further the muting of the visual clutter and distractions, while improving and making it easier to find what you may be needing next.

A unique, exhilarating visual feeling is experienced anytime you give opportunity to Breeze to resize and adapt its multiple components to a new resolution, window or monitor size: Breeze smoothly adapts to changes in resizing of your screen windows and works at any resolution you throw at it. Breeze can jump from full screen to a highly reduced window size without whining or showing difficulties. But hey, don't get me wrong, this is not just eye candy, it is a super bonus for those needing to work on small laptop screens, who can still see everything in good quality while giving simultaneous wide-view image glory to those on large monitors and higher screen resolutions.

The new Breeze 5 sports a much more usable Screen/Application sharing facility, which has now matured to compete with the offerings of other major competitors in this class. The new controls allow to distinguish between applications and "windows" to be shared (on top of providing a "desktop sharing" view option), a "first" in the industry, which may prove to be quite useful.

Among the other new items immediately noticeable is an improved Q&A facility which can be very handy during live meetings and conferences in managing and efficiently coordinating the stream of comments and questions from the audience.

The "Preparing mode" is another industry feature unique to Breeze and allowing any of the presenters to set-up, rehearse, customize or edit any of the work they need to present inside Breeze, without interfering with the live delivery of the ongoing presentation.

That means that while you are showing a video clip or while attendees are taking a test inside a Breeze session, you can upload a new PowerPoint presentation, preview a few web pages that you will need to show later, and prepare a bunch files to be distributed to the attendees. Very useful.

Breeze customers now have the flexibility to launch and track content created with tools such as Macromedia Authorware 7, Macromedia Captivate, Macromedia Flash MX 2004, and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, as well as any AICC-compliant content.

Breeze 5 incorporates IT-friendly deployment features such as wizard-based directory service integration, single sign-on support through NTLM or custom-authentication mechanisms, APIs and SDKs for customization and extensibility, and the ability to support large-scale events for up to 2000 participants.

Finally, with the introduction of a telephone gateway in Breeze 5, organizations can leverage their existing telephony bridges and realize the benefit of choice when considering bridge integration and in-meeting call controls. Users can now access flexible conference calling directly within the Breeze meeting room and individually control the volume of each caller or mute as needed.

While previously Breeze was made up and commercialized in three separate modules (Live, Presenter and Training) now the components have grown from three to four plus one (Server, Training, Presenter, Events, Meeting).

The new core component, at least for those acquiring a license, is the Breeze Communication Server which integrates real-time and on-demand communications and provides user administration, tracking, and reporting, as well as integrated content management across all Breeze applications through a fully searchable content library. The Breeze Communication Server supports single-server or clustered environments and it is open and extensible through industry-standard APIs.

Breeze Meeting, which is the core web conferencing component, delivers real-time meetings and seminars that everyone can access instantly, through any web browser, without downloading cumbersome plug-ins. Breeze Meeting support the sharing of rich content, including streaming audio, video, and software simulations, and also enables multi-point video conferencing.

Breeze Training which includes the in-depth quizzing, tracking and reporting components needed to manage, deploy, and track engaging online courses. Breeze Training curriculum management capabilities enable integration of both live and self-paced courses, including courses created with other authoring tools. User completion and course results can be tracked using convenient dashboard reports or in highly detailed learner-by-learner and question-by-question reports.

Breeze Presenter which enables PowerPoint authoring of narrated, self-paced elearning courses and on-demand presentations, and provides unique support for high-impact content through adaptive streaming of audio and video. Breeze Presenter also integrates a drag-and-drop audio editor and a wizard-based quiz and survey creation facility to enable subject matter experts to easily deliver professional-quality e-learning courses.

Breeze Events, which is used to manage user registration, qualification, notification, automatic e-mail reminders, and tracking for large online seminars and presentations. It supports online registration, events listings, and full branding. Breeze Events also generates detailed reports on attendee demographics, registrations, attendance, and answers to both registration survey responses and in-session polls.

While Paul Ritter, research director, at Wainhouse Research told Macromedia that "the release of Macromedia Breeze 5 moves Macromedia into a horse race with Microsoft, WebEx, and IBM," I only see Microsoft, Webex and an increasing large bunch of "others" (Genesys, Interwise, Oracle, etc.) having to do a lot of catch up to provide as competitive and usable a product to the market as Breeze has done.

Price:
Breeze is available both as a licensed product which can be installed inside an organization firewall as well as a hosted service with many different pricing options available to select from. The hosted solution of Macromedia Breeze 5 is available today, and the licensed solution will be available on May 31, 2005.

Unfortunately Breeze pricing info is not readily accessible on the Macromedia official Breeze site and it appears as if one needs to be forced into a sales conversation with somebody from Macromedia in order to get the full story on prices.

Free try-out
A fully-featured 15-day Breeze trial is accessible to all at:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/breeze/trial/

What to improve:

Annotation tools. Like most everyone else in the industry Breeze missed altogether the boat when it comes to providing a useful and well designed set of live markup and annotation tools. Though the toolbar and tools icons look very elegant and accessible their abilities and configuration leaves a lot to be desired.

I will not go into the details of this, as I have long expressed my thoughts on how such a facility should be designed to be truly effective. What is evident is that those who have designed this toolset and approved its functionality clearly do not have a strong experience in delivering courses while needing to annotate or mark-up other content.

A year ago I said publicly: "this is one (whiteboarding and live mark-up) of the areas where there is a major opportunity to take a strong competitive advantage over others." Not only I confirm that this remains the case but that the advantage and marketing gain that can be made has probably increased too due to the lack of valid contenders in this specific arena.

Strategy to win an even wider market

Breeze gets my best votes for being the most flexible and effective web conferencing and real-time collaboration tool I have access to.

I really like this tool and have been closely watching it for nearly a year, without making official final statements or giving early superficial judgments. I have taken the tool to test and have remained positively impressed with most of its features.

What I cannot stand, outside the annotation and mark-up tools handicaps is the price and the marketing approach adopted until now for this tool.

First, and foremost we need some more transparency and visibility for Breeze pricing strategy. This is what i would like. If the pricing options are so complex that they need to be discussed and calculated only with a "customer representative", then I don't think Breeze can make the big jump in the market his bidders are expecting it to make.

Second, we need some heavy price slashing that allows smaller sized businesses, the true early adopters, to start considering Breeze among the options to consider. We are seeing at least one Macromedia major competitor starting to adopt these strategy and I think this is the road to take.

The tool sells itself to a blind man: give it opportunity to spread, be seen, and used by many. Don't keep it in a golden cage.

Differentiate pricing by providing a smaller feature set to small businesses and professionals, while allowing easy ways to add more advanced features at a premium.

Get wider adoption, mindshare and make yourself the reference tool for how others will need to be to beat you.

We are ready.