When the class’s founder, Michael Chasen, was in college, he and a buddy got here up with the idea for Blackboard, a tool for organizing online classes. His original company was acquired for $1.64 billion in 2011. Chasen developed later Classa Zoom add-on that was intended to assist teachers higher use Zoom in the classroom during the pandemic, something that they had difficulty doing at the starting of the pandemic.
But Chasen says individuals who used Class kept telling him they needed something similar for business purposes, and on Thursday Class announced the release Pro Features for Zoomdesigned specifically for business users.
Instead of simply sharing a single screen that only one participant has control over, ProFeatures allows everyone to edit a document in Microsoft Office or Google Docs, brainstorm on a Miro board, or edit code collaboratively in Microsoft Visual Studio, to call a few examples. If the desired SaaS tool is not part of the default toolkit, a built-in browser is available to access any website or application.
What’s more, you’ll be able to have multiple tabs open, so people can share multiple screens as an alternative of just the presenter.
“All the customers said, ‘Hey, I’d like to use this in my regular meetings.’ So I told my developers to take our product, turn off the learning tools and just leave the core improvements we had made to Zoom,” Chasen told TechCrunch.
Although Class performed well – the company raised $164 million, on Crunchbase — Chasen saw an opportunity to develop his business. “We now have two products. We have a class for Zoom and a class for Microsoft Teams. And now we also have ProFeatures for Zoom,” he said.
He had already sold $17 million price of ProFeatures enterprise licenses before the product officially launched, so he knew he was on to something. Individual users can use it for free, but power comes into play when multiple people in a meeting use its advanced features.
The money comes from an enterprise license that gives enterprise features equivalent to centralized IT control, single sign-on, and other features that IT needs to manage usage across a large organization.
However, Chasen says he discovered that the tool was viral in nature. “We actually have something really interesting that we do, which is viral marketing, but no one has done it yet. So if you join a meeting, let’s say you’re with 10 other people on regular Zoom but you have Pro features, when you share a document, everyone will get a message from you saying, “Hey, I’m sharing this Word document. It can only be viewed on Zoom with screen share. But if you have ProFeatures, you can edit them. Click here to download ProFeatures,” he said.
If you don’t need to share editing with your entire group, you’ll be able to limit who can see it or what participants can do, equivalent to viewing, editing, or commenting. Additionally, you’ll be able to revoke these permissions after the meeting ends.
Finally, there is an AI component, ProFeatues AI Assistant, which may transcribe a meeting in addition to capture all documents, files and web sites shared inside the meeting – and may answer questions about anything discussed in the meeting, including documents and web sites that have been shared.
Professional features is available from today as part of classes.