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Introducing Macromedia Breeze

With Macromedia Breeze, organizations can communicate, collaborate, and train online with ease. This integrated solution provides both real-time online meetings and on-demand presentations and e-learning courses—which audiences can see and hear anytime, anywhere through any web browser. Macromedia Breeze blends common business tools like Microsoft PowerPoint and web browsers with the power of Macromedia Flash into a single, integrated solution. Upon adopting Breeze, organizations can immediately realize gains through more effective communications at a much lower cost.

Macromedia Breeze provides a fully featured solution to meet the web communication demands of organizations around the world. Breeze also provides a comprehensive extensibility framework, allowing organizations to extend the Breeze solution to meet their specific requirements. Macromedia Breeze 4.0 provides several extensibility options, including a comprehensive set of XML-based web services for extending the Breeze Live meeting experience. This article provides you with an overview of these extensibility options and provides pointers to more detailed information available throughout Macromedia to get you started on working with Breeze.

Macromedia Breeze Architecture Overview

Macromedia Breeze supports a wide array of web communication needs, including on-demand content viewing as well as real-time communication. Breeze can be deployed in either a hosted or licensed model, providing a high degree of flexibility for customers. In order to deliver an optimized experience regardless of communication mode, Breeze provides a highly scalable, secure, and flexible architecture in order to support the demands of real-time and on-demand communication. Macromedia Breeze leverages many industry-standard technologies to deliver a highly scalable, flexible, and open solution to address current and future customer requirements. These technologies include the use of Java, XML, XSLT, and Macromedia Flash.

The following Breeze components leverage these technologies:

Breeze Application Server

The application server contains and executes all of the business logic necessary for delivering content to end users. This application server is responsible for user, group, and session management, among other tasks, and may be deployed in highly redundant fashion as necessary.

Breeze Communication Server

The communication server handles all of the real-time streaming and delivery of rich-media content, including video and Breeze Live experiences. This communication server can be deployed in a highly redundant fashion to scale to the real-time requirements of an organization.

Breeze Transcoding Engine

The transcoding engine handles all media conversion for the Breeze solution. This includes Microsoft PowerPoint and audio conversion to Macromedia Flash, as well as other associated media files. The transcoding engine can also be deployed in a highly redundant fashion along with the application and communication server.

Breeze Database

The Breeze database stores application metadata, including user, group, content, and reporting information.

Depending on the Macromedia Breeze modules purchased (Presentation, Training, or Live), the modules listed above will be enabled to support the needs of these solutions.

Breeze XML Web Services

The Macromedia Breeze platform provides the infrastructure leveraged by the Macromedia Presentation, Training, and Live applications. You now have the ability to extend and integrate these applications through the use of a complete web services framework. You can incorporate Breeze functionality and reporting information directly into third-party systems such as portals, CRM, and ERP systems. You can use these web services to manage the full breadth of the solution, including everything from user management to in-depth reporting on application usage. Because the integration and configuration needs of organizations vary, let's take a look at a few common requirements.

Let's assume you have an existing user management system of record, such as LDAP, Microsoft Exchange, or another third-party system. This central user management system has existing business processes and infrastructure deployed, and you want to leverage these investments in Breeze as well. The XML web services that Breeze provides allow for complete user management by an external system, such as a directory service. You can write an application which synchronizes users between these two systems. For example, you could write a J2EE-based application (or using your technology of choice) that pulls a list of users from the directory service, compares this list against Breeze users, and then performs the necessary updates within the Breeze user repository. This is just one example of the opportunities you have in building integrations and new features with the XML web services provided with Macromedia Breeze. Be sure to check the Macromedia Developer Center for more XML web services examples, including Introduction to the Macromedia Breeze Web Services by Michael Fitzpatrick .

Recommended Reading

• Macromedia Breeze Product Overview
• Macromedia Breeze Technology and Architecture Overview

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