Apr 09 2004
Using Macromedia Breeze Live: I’ll do it more often!
Today was my first day that I was actually hosting a Breeze Live meeting ‘for real’ instead of doing the sales pitch demo. It’s was great, very productive and saved me more than 3 hours of travelling by car. I am defenitely going to do this more often.
The most time consuming part of my job at Macromedia is to travel from and to all the customers, partners and events that I am visiting. This week I got really sick of all the traffic that I am facing, and all the hours of work that I am loosing when waiting in the car for the queue to move on. So, I decided to not visit the two companies that I had a meeting with today. Instead of that I invited them for a Breeze live meeting.
My first meeting was to discuss an opportunity that one of our partners has with a customer. They presented their plan to me by uploading their PowerPoint presentation to the Breeze Live server, which nicely converted it into a small Flash presentation. I turned on my webcam and we used a phone conferencing system to brief the others that were not behind the computer. The partner guided me through their plans step by step. I took the opportunity of doing a screen-share of several sample Rich Internet Applications that I am running locally, just to give them more inspiration.
The meeting itself lasted only 45 minutes and after that I could immediately go on with the rest of my works. Normally it would have taken me almost two hours just to get there and back! Talk about efficiency.
The second meeting also went superb. It was a meeting with another partner in which I had to talk through a Breeze opportunity that they have. They wanted to know the ins and outs of the product which I had outlined in a presentation. After that we did some screen and application sharing, used the whiteboard, chat, etc etc (actually, we used most of the new Breeze Live 4 features).
This meeting itself took almost two hours, so we had a lot to discuss. But our conversation was no split second suffering from the fact that we were not in the same room… it went superb! And yes, the partner had the same feeling; he could just do the meeting from his home office whilst he normally should have booked the meeting room in the office and he would have to travel there as well.
My conclusion: I have to do this more often!
(even if it was only to have more time available to play with Flex ;-))
6 responses so far
Excellent!
It’s always a great feeling when you hear people being succesful using a product you contributed in building…
🙂
Dear Waldo,
I certainly ‘second’ your enthusiasm. I’ve started to do Breeze Live presentations and it really opens up a new world of possibilities.
I know Macromedia has gotten feedback regarding the price of Breeze, but I haven’t seen any web hosts crop up and do some type of timesharing approach for Breeze. I would definitely extend my licenses if there were a way to pay for a block of seats that I had to schedule with others.
Any chance such a situation has just escaped my notice somewhere?
-jonathan
Hi Jonathan. As far as I know, they End User License Agreement does not allow this kind of hosting service. I like the idea though, it’s like the the Flash Video Streaming Service (http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashcom/fvss/) but then for Breeze. I’ll pass the message through!
Having heard about this for quite some time now. I wonder how much it costs
Breeze is a very robust platform with many modules and different usages and licenses. So it’s hard to give you one single pricing. It really depends on how many users you want to have, whether you host it yourself or ask Macromedia to do it for you, which functionality you want to be activated etc. Typically it starts at several thousand euros but it can go up to over several 10.000 or even 100.000 euros if you are a large organisation willing to use all functionality.
If you have a real interest in Breeze I would encourage to contact your local Macromedia sales person.