Review: Macromedia Breeze 4.1

Online meetings provide a great way to bring together people who are spread out geographically without taking a huge bite out of the travel budget. Breeze 4.1 is the latest version of Macromedia’s tool for online meetings, presentations, and training.

Breeze provides a content library with searchable archives and it integrates with PowerPoint, allowing you to add a voiceover soundtrack and Flash movies. It also allows you to easily post the presentation to Breeze’s Web site or to your own company intranet or Web site. What’s more, Breeze includes a host of management tools that provide a way to control use and access, and to manage your Breeze account.

The program is available as a hosted solution starting at $84 per seat per month, or you can purchase a perpetual license beginning at $25,000. This review looks at the hosted solution, concentrating on the PowerPoint integration component.

You begin by going online and signing up for a Breeze account. If you want to take advantage of the PowerPoint integration, you need to download the PowerPoint and FlashPaper plug-ins. The next time you open PowerPoint, you will see two new menus: one for FlashPaper and one for Breeze (see Figure 1 below).