Class founder Michael Chasen was in college when he and a friend came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organization tool. His former company was acquired in 2011 for $1.64 billion. Chasen then developed Class, a Zoom add-on, to help teachers leverage Zoom more effectively in classroom environments during the pandemic, which was difficult in the early days of the pandemic. .
But Chasen said people using Class continue to say their businesses need something similar, and on Thursday Class announced the release of ProFeature for Zoom, which is designed specifically for business users. did.
Rather than simply sharing a single screen that only one participant can control, ProFeature allows everyone to edit documents in Microsoft Office or Google Docs, or brainstorm on Miro Whiteboard, to name a few. or edit the code together in Microsoft Visual Studio. Even if the SaaS tools you need aren't in your default toolset, there's a built-in browser that lets you access websites and apps.
Additionally, you can open multiple tabs and share multiple screens with other users, not just the presenter.
“A lot of our clients have said, “I want to use this for regular meetings.'' So we asked our developers to use our product, turned off the learning tools, and did what we did fundamentally. We only left the most important improvements to Zoom,” Chasen told TechCrunch.
Although Class was doing well (the company had raised $164 million, according to Crunchbase), Chasen saw an opportunity to expand the business. “So we have two products now. We have Class for Zoom and Class for Microsoft Teams. And now we also offer his ProFeature for Zoom,” he said.
Even before he officially developed the product, he knew he was on to something because he had already managed to sell $17 million worth of ProFeature enterprise licenses. It's free for individual users, but it's powerful when multiple people in a meeting use advanced features.
This funding comes from enterprise licenses. Enterprise licenses provide centralized IT management, single sign-on, and other enterprise features that IT departments need to control usage in large organizations.
But Chasen says the tool has proven to have viral properties. “Actually, we're doing something very interesting, and that's viral marketing, which no one's doing yet. So if you go into a meeting and you're with 10 other people on a regular Zoom, However, there is a Pro feature where when you share a document, everyone receives a message from you that says, “I'm sharing this Word document.” . You can only view it by screen sharing on Zoom. However, you can edit it if you have Profiles. Click here to download his ProFeature,” he said.
Zoom ProFeature opens when you edit a Word document together. Image credit: ProFeatures
If you don't want to share editing capabilities with the entire group, you can limit who can see them and what participants can do, such as view, edit, and comment. Additionally, you can revoke those privileges after the meeting ends.
Finally, the AI component, ProFeatues AI Assistant, can transcribe meetings and capture all documents, files, and web pages shared within a meeting.
Meetings – Answer questions about everything discussed at the meeting, including shared documents and web pages.
ProFeature will be available to classes starting today.