Making presentations a Breeze

Macromedia has released its first major enhancement of Breeze since it acquired the technology when it scooped up Presedia just over a year ago. I got a demo of the new version and it’s pretty slick, combining audio, slides, application sharing and more into a single interface with no plug-in to download (unless you’re one of the 2% of Internet users that don’t have the Flash plug-in.) Some of the new features include a whiteboard, polling, application and desktop sharing. The whiteboard feature can even be used on top of video. What’s cool about Flash is that it uses vector-based graphics, which help reduce the amount of bandwidth required for rich visual presentations. Another neat feature is FlashPaper, an alternative to PDF that allows documents to be included with the presentation and giving participants the ability to print them as they would if they received the original file (say a Word document) in e-mail. Presentations can be both live and on-demand, with on-demand version indexed and searchable – a nice feature if some is sitting down to an hour-long presentation but only is interested in small segment 43 minutes in.

Breeze is available as a hosted service or can be bought and installed locally. The hosted service starts at $85 per seat per month. For those wishing to buy and install the price starts at $25,000.