XplanaZine

Back in the spring when Macromedia announced it was buying Presedia, the question I had was how they planned to make it less about Microsoft and more about Macromedia.
Presedia produced a wonderful application for publishing and Microsoft PowerPoint slides to the Web, adding voice and sound to the presentations, and hosting them. It also had a learning suite based on the same technology. Macromedia acquired the company and has moved quickly to add new features and fold the application into its own vision of presentation and learning software. I sat through an interesting presentation last week that showed me both the potential of Macromedia Breeze and the direction of Macromedia regarding teaching and learning.
I must admit that, at first, I found the whole “use PowerPoint for your Macromedia presentations” turn a bit odd. After all, I had been in a number of Macromedia presentations where they made a big deal out of not needing to use PowerPoint anymore because of the superiority of Flash. Well, regardless of Flash’s abilities, the public has already voted on powerPoint and, as a Macromedia representative told me last week, “we have recognized that PowerPoint will continue to be the dominant player and we need to account for that in our product lineup.”
Macromedia has re-branded Presedia’s product into Breeze and has enhanced its functionalities. More importantly, they have begun to position Breeze within their overall communications vision and architecture. What Macromedia is attempting to do with Breeze and other products like its Flash Communication Server is provide a turnkey solution for presentations and training at the enterprise level. They have long been the dominant force in Web animation and multimedia functionality. Since Dreamweaver 3.0 they have been working aggressively to integrate the elearning functionality of products like Authorware and Director into its Web development platform. Now they are pushing voice, streaming video, and a training platform into the mix. The result, as you might expect, is full of promise and potential. It is not, however, without its share of issues.
The bottom line is that Breeze really does make presentations a … welll… a breeze. It creates Flash based rich media content from your PowerPoint presentations and posts them on a central media server for great Web play. Such rich media content can be delivered online to audiences along with several niceties like password protection, reporting, search, quizzes, etc. All put together, Breeze provides an easy and elegant solution to quickly inform, educate and train anyone. The wizards and interface are elegant and the options for adding sound to your presentations are entirely adequate.
The Breeze Training module extends the presentation features of Breeze into a fairly robust training platform. Breeze Training boasts the following features –

1. Email Course Notifications: Automated email notifications provide learners with instructions and a hyperlink directly to each course.
2. Automated Course Reminders: Reminder policies can be set up that take care of sending out customizable reminder emails to learners ensuring complete follow through.
3. Instantly Notify Enrollees: Easily notify learners enrolled on a course based on their status (e.g. send an email to all enrollees who have not yet taken a course).
4. Allow Learners to Register Themselves: Courses can optionally be set up to allow learners to register themselves and create their own logins.
5. Support for Large User Directories: Large user directories can be managed using facilities such as groups, bulk import, filter and search.
6. Track Data Appropriate to Your Specific Application: Capture and track organization specific information using custom fields completed when users are created or register.
7. Unique Course Certificate Numbers: Unique course certificates provided in reports for passing enrollees.
8. AICC and SCORM adapters

In spite of the nice features and great start for breeze, however, the product is not without several cons. First, it ain’t cheap. This is evident from the fact that there is no published pricing for the product but, instead, a suggestion that interested parties should contact their Macromedia representative. In the software world this is analogous to a restaurant that doesn’t publish its prices ont he menu. It is also not fully integrated into the Macromedia family yet. The different modules make good use of Flash technologies and allow the company to go after WebEx and Microsoft. But, not all flash movie types or actions are supported and it is unclear what, if any, adaptations can be made to the Training module. This module does not yet integrate other Macromedia technologies the way their core applications do. Finally,, in spite of the AICC/SCORM adapters (and soon-to-come IMS), this is still a proprietary (and did we mention expensive) solution. It is powerful and slick, but is out of reach for the average user. I do not have any figures on the educational pricing for Breeze and that may put it within reach of some schools and institutions.
Avoiding the pedagogical debates involving PowerPoint, Breeze is a nice platform that will only get better. When macromedia integrates its full core product line fully into Breeze, it will definitely be a player int he market.