Macromedia Inc. on Monday announced the availability of Breeze 5, a new version of their Web conferencing and collaboration software designed to work hand in hand with Macromedia’s ubiquitous Flash technology. Breeze 5 touts myriad enhancements including improved content-sharing capabilities for Mac users.
Breeze 5 enables companies to provide Web-based teleconferences to remote users. It’s available both as a pay-to-play service and as a package that companies can install on their own hardware. Breeze is suitable for use as an online training management system, for video teleconferencing, online demonstrations and other purposes. Since launching Breeze, Macromedia has set major Web teleconferencing players like WebEx, Microsoft and IBM squarely in its sights.
The new version, Breeze 5 now touts capabilities including Voice over IP (VoIP), on-demand video and realtime multipoint video conferencing. Administrators can manage course curricula, and users can now activate full-screen video. Enhanced tracking and reporting capabilities have been added, and more question and quiz types are now available for use.
While Mac users have been able to participate in Breeze conferences on the receiving end, they’ve been limited in what they can do as conference leaders. With Breeze 5, those limitations have been lifted: Mac users can now run conferences, sharing their screen, posting documents and whiteboard information, or even allowing other Breeze 5 conference participants to remote control their screen, the same way that PC users do.
Also announced today is Breeze 5 support for a telephone gateway based on technology developed by Premiere Global Services. In this way, Breeze 5 conferences can now include attendees who are communicating over the phone rather than through the Web. Conference administrators can individually control the volume of each caller or even mute them as needed.
Breeze 5 is available as a hosted solution beginning today. As a licensed solution, Breeze 5 will be available on May 31, 2005. Service plans begin at US$0.32 per minute, per user.