When Class founder Michael Chason was in college, he and a friend came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online class organizational tool. their parent company was Acquired for $1.64 billion in 2011. Chasen developed later ClassA Zoom add-on during the pandemic to help teachers better use Zoom in a classroom setting, something they struggled to do at the beginning of the pandemic.
But Chasen says people who use Class kept telling him they needed something similar for business, and on Thursday Class announced its release. Features for ZoomSpecially designed for business users.
Instead of simply sharing a screen where only one participant has control, ProFeatures allows everyone to edit a document in Microsoft Office or Google Docs, brainstorm on a Miro whiteboard, or create a video in Microsoft Visual Studio, as some examples. Allows you to edit code as well. If the SaaS tool you want isn’t part of the default set of tools, there’s a built-in browser to access any website or app.
Plus, you can open multiple tabs, allowing people to share multiple screens instead of just the presenter.
“I had all these customers saying, ‘Hey, I’d love to use this for my regular meetings.’ So I told our developers to take our product, turn off the learning tools, and leave the fundamental improvements we’ve made to Zoom,” Chasen told TechCrunch.
While Claas was performing well – the company has raised $164 million, Per Crunchbase – Chasen saw an opportunity to expand his business. “So now we have two products. We have classes for Zoom and classes for Microsoft Teams. And now we also have pro features for Zoom,” he said.
He’s already been able to sell $17 million worth of ProFeatures enterprise licenses even before he officially had a product, so he knew he was on to something. Individual users can use it for free, but the power comes when multiple people in a meeting are using advanced features.
This money comes from an enterprise license, which provides enterprise features like centralized control for IT, single sign on, and other things that an IT department needs to control usage across a large organization.
But Chasen says he’s found the tool to have a viral quality. “We have something really interesting, which is viral marketing that we do, and no one has done it yet. So if you join a meeting, let’s say you’re in regular Zoom with 10 other people, but you have the Pro features, when you share a document, everyone gets a message from you, ‘Hey, I’m sharing this Word document. You can only view it in Zoom with screen share. But if you have the properties, you can edit it. Click here to download specifications,” he said.
If you don’t want to share the ability to edit with the entire group, you can limit who can see it or what participants can do like view, edit, or comment. Additionally, you can choose to revoke those permissions after the meeting ends.
Finally, there’s an AI component, ProfitUs AI Assistant, which can transcribe meetings as well as capture all the documents, files, and webpages shared.
Meeting – and it can answer questions on everything discussed in the meeting, including shared documents and web pages.
ProFeatures Available from classes starting today.
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