Very exciting news for me personally and for the school district where I work this week. Our purchase of a license for Breeze Live and Breeze training was approved by our Board. Over the coming weeks and months I'll be heavily involved in administering accounts and training users in this great tool.

As in any large organizations shepherding the purchase through the required permissions and multitude of questions took a great deal of time and energy on my part, but it was a worthwhile endeavor for the simple fact that Breeze just works. Along the way various groups tossed out ideas for competing products and services, with the usual question being "Have you looked at this?" And yes, I did look at a number of video conferencing solutions.

I won't get into all the details here, but there are any number of companies offering services similar to what Breeze does, but there were compelling reasons to stick with the Breeze purchase. Not least of these was cost. One popular service would have cost $129,000.00 more each year than our entire purchase of Breeze for a comparable number of users and meetings.

The second reason for choosing Breeze was the impact on our network's bandwidth. With 60,000 plus computers in our school district, bandwidth is a major concern, and even though some products can deliver higher quality video and additional features, none of those solutions were able to do so without bringing our network to its knees. Not to mention the minimal impact Breeze has on the server we purchased for running the program. In a test that we did last week the server never went over 10% of its processor capacity, even with 8 simultaneous video and audio streams running.

Finally, Breeze uses the Flash player, a proven technology that, well, just works. No expensive switches to purchase and configure. No additional plug-ins for viewers to install. And once again, it just works. And that's a huge advantage over some of the other products that I've seen out there.