Moving at the Speed of Creativity - Macromedia Breeze update

Macromedia Breeze update

Published by Wesley Fryer in apple, edtech on April 25th, 2006

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I had a chance to play with the latest version of Macromedia Breeze (Breeze 5) yesterday, and was pleased to find it more cross-platform than its predecessors I had used. There are four different, possible roles during an online Breeze meeting:

Breeze Presenter Content Viewers (passive)
Breeze Meeting Participants (limited interactivity)
Breeze Meeting Presenters (robust interactivity)
Breeze Presenter Authors (full control)

From what I can tell, you still need to use a Windows OS computer to be a “Breeze Presenter Author,” but that person can delegate people on other platforms to be “Breeze Meeting Presenters” during a connection. The screen sharing worked well from a Macintosh OS X computer, going to Windows clients, and that was impressive. Hopefully Macromedia (at some point) will make Breeze session authorship possible from Macintosh and Linux computers as well.

For more details, see the Breeze System Requirements page from Macromedia.

Breeze is a robust, interactive platform for synchronous online meetings. The server license price is steep, especially if you want lots of client licenses, but Breeze can do “synchronous things” with audio and videoconferencing technologies that other systems cannot yet do– from what I have seen. I like how it intelligently pushes out content based on the connection speed specified by an enduser. As the Breeze platform continues to evolve and mature, hopefully we will see even better cross-platform computer compatibility.