Breeze Article
Lessons Learned from a Former Breeze Newbie
Table of Contents
Case Study: An Overview of Using Breeze Meeting, Flash, and Captivate (formerly RoboDemo)
Over the past couple of years, I investigated whether to use web conferencing software as part of my business. While I was excited by the potential, I weighed whether the costs would outweigh the benefits for my small company. The opportunity to try Breeze Meeting gave me compelling evidence that such a technology is a necessary part of my business.
In the following sections, I explain how I used the Breeze Meeting trial to deliver the following communications:
- Ten, two-hour developer seminars
- Six client meetings
- Three conversations with my remote developer teams
- Two conference talks
Ten Two-Hour Developer Seminars
I found a niche in the e-Learning community to complement my company’s project development services for performance-based training on equipment. Today, most of my business involves teaching the best practice methodologies for designing and building equipment simulations, as described in the book I co-wrote in 2002, Flash MX for Interactive Simulation: How to Construct and Use Device Simulations. The live training consists of management lectures, developer seminars, and half-day, full-day, and customized-length workshops. Also, I am currently creating full-semester courses, which I will deliver online.
As a technical introduction to the programming methodologies, I prepared a two-hour, two-part presentation called “Introduction to Programming Equipment Simulators in Flash.” Part 1 is an introduction to the concepts of building simulators, focusing on UML Statecharts. Part 2 is a guided application of the methodologies, in which I step participants through the design and construction of two simple traffic light examples (Figure 1).
I offered the seminars eight times to the public, and twice to private groups. In half of the sessions, attendees connected to the presentation on their own; in the other half of the sessions, a mix of shared connections (groups of people at one site) and individual connections attended.
Figure 1a. In part 2 of the seminar, users applied the methodologies to build a simple traffic light system.
Figure 1b. Next, users built a more complex traffic light system.
Part 1, which is about concepts, lasted approximately one hour and gave attendees the following experience:
- I talked over Microsoft PowerPoint slides
- Communicated with the participants through text chat
- Displayed canned animations prepared with Captivate (formerly RoboDemo) to demonstrate pre-scripted examples
- Presented examples made with Flash that participants could interact with
- Took polls to ensure the participants understood the concepts. (Early participant feedback prompted me to prepare slide handouts that participants could download before and after the session.)
Initially, I worried about keeping their attention for the hour, but participants confirmed that the operation was smooth and that they were sufficiently engaged with meaningful, interactive exercises. While I’d like to believe it was mostly due to my engaging charm and witty repartee, in all honesty, I think the most successful aspect was presenting participants with engaging interactive examples, with which they could experiment and review the lesson while I presented concepts. Unfortunately, one user connection in almost every session had some technical difficulties and had to re-enter the meeting, sometimes several times. It was unclear where the breakdown occurred.
All Captivate (formerly RoboDemo) examples in the presentation had playback controls embedded within them, so that each user could pause and replay any part of the Captivate (formerly RoboDemo) movie (a SWF file). In fact, when you open a SWF file directly in Breeze Meeting, users can interact with the example. Often, I used the pointer overlay to call attention to areas I described. When you open a SWF movie, every user sees the movie, but each user cannot see what any of the other users are doing. I sorely missed the ability to see what my users were doing, for example, to answer a question. While I could have gone into screen share mode and have the user show me what he or she was doing, I would have lost the fluidity of the animation because screen share updating occurs, at most, a few times a second.
Since Breeze is based in Macromedia Flash, my Flash movies displayed at a suitably responsive refresh interval. I think that when a developer or programmer eventually customizes a module (called a “pod”) to permit event sharing within SWFs, Breeze will lead users to an exciting dimension for real-time, live product support and training—imagine a trainer teaching a remote customer or salesperson to use a product by demonstrating functionality through simulated equipment.
You cannot open certain Flash movies within Breeze, In these cases, I linked to the movies from web pages and directed the users to browse to the pages. I used this method to show animations made with the full-motion video feature in Macromedia Captivate (formerly RoboDemo) 5. This approach was better than launching SWFs within Breeze, in some ways, because the SWF movie could run at its native rate—SWFs inside Breeze always run at 30 frames per second. The drawback to this technique is that it moves the user outside of the Breeze application, and outside of the presenter's control.
After a ten-minute break following Part 1, I began Part 2, which lasts for 45 minutes and demonstrates how to build an application using the concepts presented in Part 1. In Part 2, I coaxed the participants into a more hands-on approach, using the whiteboard to collaboratively design the systems, using text chat for questions, answers, and discussions, and using screen and application sharing to illustrate how to program the systems.
In Breeze, you can arrange the layout of the pods (whiteboard, slides, chat, and so forth), which helps enormously (see Figure 2). For example, once I worked with the participants to design the traffic light system on the whiteboard, I could switch to a layout for programming (more screen sharing), reducing the size of the whiteboard, while it was still visible (notice the whiteboard in Figure 2 remains visible in Figure 3, but is reduced in size). Using this simple feature, I could maximize the size and adjust the layout, focusing on the primary elements for the current interaction.
Although the participants communicated with me primarily through text chat, they also used their microphones through Breeze’s VoIP (Voice over IP) feature when they felt they could express themselves better through voice. Obviously, this feature worked best when the delays in audio communication were small. As I point out in the Mechanics of Preparing and Delivering Presentations in Breeze Meeting section, you can tell Breeze to freeze your web cam video and mute your microphone when you are not trying to communicate. This ensures you don’t use extra bandwidth transmitting your distracting office noises unnecessarily.
Figure 2. Working on the whiteboard
Figure 3. Screen share with whiteboard visible
In two of the ten seminars, I asked participants to assist in programming the simulations (typing code through the application sharing feature). During each seminar, I decided whether I thought there was enough time, and whether the volunteers were comfortable enough with the interface to accomplish the objectives.
The most feedback I received was about the whiteboard. Some users commented on its responsiveness, and others about its usability (tools, color selection, and so forth). Certainly a presenter can make the process of using the whiteboard easier for users—as a presenter, you have to be very clear what you want the participants to do; don't just open up the whiteboard for brainstorming. Also, having the users watch an introductory movie would have made the users' experiences more smooth. I go into more details on lessons learned later in this article.
Client and Technical Development Meetings
The client meetings and the meetings with my co-developer teams were much like Part 2 of the developer seminar—focused on guided interaction. Based on what I had learned, I made appropriate layouts to emphasize the whiteboard, marking up slides, and screen sharing. Because these meetings involved extensive dialogue, I used telephones for audio rather than VoIP.
In general, people who had not experienced Breeze, or had done so only at conferences or user groups were impressed—even those who had used other web conferencing software. In particular, being able to launch SWF movies within Breeze instead of launching them in separate browser windows helped. We used the whiteboard extensively during development meetings, and there were fewer complaints than in the developer seminars. I believe this was due to the participants having a greater opportunity to practice using the tools.
A pleasant and unanticipated added value of conducting these meetings remotely was the ability to record them. We replayed particular client comments, observations, and concerns. We could document the brainstorming sessions and meeting notes. I see our team using these meeting recordings to make future meetings more efficient or to help team members who could not make the meetings get up-to-speed more quickly.
Conference Talks
I presented two conference talks with Breeze: first, at a conference on Smart Medical Technologies hosted by NASA, and second, as part of a symposium on online simulation (through the e-Learning Forum). In each conference, I spoke to a group of 50-100 people. There were a couple of additional remote participants and a facilitator onsite to moderate the conference, but the opportunity for interaction was very limited.
Figure 4. Canned demonstration of preparing blood sample for analysis
Because I could not rely on participation (it was very difficult to read the audience through my limited views), I kept the presentation as short as possible—saving the interactive user segment for after the presentation. Therefore, I used basic features such as slides, scripted Captivate (formerly RoboDemo) examples, text chat, and demonstrations through screen sharing (the audience viewing my desktop in real-time) for more dynamic and complex interactions.
Being a remote presenter was a great advantage in terms of time and logistic expenses, but so much of the value of conferences is in the face-to-face interaction, the approachability of the speaker, and the networking opportunities. For example, in the talk I gave to NASA, the only question I received was which software I was using to do the presentation. Furthermore, I arranged to be available during the break for individual questions and answers; surprisingly, no one in the audience of 100 people took advantage of this.
The lessons I learned from this experience was to use web conferencing software for:
- Meetings that one simply cannot attend in person
- When you are part of a session led by an onsite presenter, or someone onsite can take an active role in the presentation
- To identify which groups or individuals to follow up with on a more personal level. For example, you might do a national product launch in this format, followed up with scheduled interactive meetings with regional groups.
Case Study Summary
Overall, I was very pleased with Breeze Meeting—by its feature set and interface intuitiveness—as were the meeting participants.
Now to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this article: Is this type of tool necessary for my business? It is necessary because I want to reduce the expenses related to client and developer meetings (I work with groups all around the world), as well as the additional revenue from remote developer training.
Medium and large companies today clearly need some type of web conferencing tool. However, this experience has convinced me that even a small company like mine, of five to ten people, needs a web conferencing tool, especially as we work with remote project teams and work for remote clients. I recommend trying Macromedia Breeze to see how it can benefit your company—I think you will be pleasantly surprised. In the following sections, I explain lessons learned from using Breeze.
