In an attempt to streamline the paperwork in school and become more digital I have invested in Meetings by Exquisitus to produce the agendas and minutes of some meetings that I’m part of in school next year.
There is surprisingly very few reasonably priced apps out there that are specifically for writing agendas and taking minutes from meetings. I’ve tried the main competition - "Meetings - Getting Meetings Done" but wasn’t happy with the workflow. There were also some glaring ommissions in the the software - most noticably the ability to back up, email and share the minutes. There is also Minutes.io which is okay for taking minutes for those with a persistent internet connection (something that is not always available when I meet).
Looking at the screencasts for Meetings beforehand showed some of the key features that I needed:
Intergration with Omnifocus
iCloud sync accross Mac / iOS devices
Reasonable price (currently ÂŁ8.99 for Mac and ÂŁ5.99 for iOS)
Minutes and Agenda’s linked
Ability to airprint / email and backup agendas and minutes
Ability to add attachments to minutes - I often take pictures of paperwork instead of bringing it home with me.
Setting up my first agenda was easy enough although there were a few workflow issues that I think could be changed in the future (see cons below).
Every change that you make is automatically synced between devices using iCloud. You choose a title, delegates to send your agenda to (drawn from your address book or added manually) and then start adding the agenda items.
Once all the agenda items are typed in you can rearrange, make them sub-sections or add further notes or attachments. You can then automatically send the agenda to those attending or print it out / create a PDF.
For taking the minutes click the minutes button. Confirm who has attended, the date and then type away under the pre-defined headings from your agenda.
When actions arise you click the action button and type in the action, who it is delegated to and the date for completion. These actions can be synced to Omnifocus / Things or the Reminders app.
At the end of the meeting again you can send the minutes directly out to delegates or print them out.
Actions can also be sent to those that you have delegated actions if you wish.
All in all a fairly fluid workflow for any meeting.
Creating an agenda is quick and easy. Ability to re-order and add sub-sections to the agenda makes this one of the easiest agenda creating tools that I’ve used in a long time (I particularly like the gestures on the iPad).
Actions are easy to add and sync with Omnifocus / Things or the built in Reminders app.
Syncing. It’s great to write on one machine and have it appear on all the others that are linked.
Emailing. Emailing directly out to those attending the meeting is essential and such a time saver.
Dates. I’d like to have been able to set a date for the meeting rather than a date for the minutes. I understand the need for the minutes to be dated on the day they are taken but there is no-where in the agenda to set the date - vital if I’m emailing the agenda to someone. As no date is set the agenda / meeting doesn’t show up in yout dashboard until you actually take minutes. I’d like to see the agenda item appearing in the dashboard before the meeting has taken place.
The response from Exquisitus regarding the dates is:
"You don't need to set the date of the meeting manually. As soon as you start a new meeting for a given day, for example, when you are in the meeting and you are about to start writing the meeting minutes, Meetings will automatically set the date for you. If you click/tap on the date of the meeting minutes you can change it to something else, but essentially it's already pre-filled for you. As you add meeting minutes the dashboard will start to get filled up with entries, which you can click and go to at a later date. We also have an option to write back links to your meeting minutes to the Calendar app. If you open Meetings->Preferences from the menu, you'll see an option called "Write minutes back to the calendar". With this option you'll also get calendar entries for your meetings, no matter which calendar app you use. When using this option, Meetings will also assign the time of the meeting and properly round it up or down to the nearest hour. For example, if you start writing your meeting minutes at 12:07 pm, your calendar entry will show 12:00pm."
Although it makes sense I’d still like the option of setting a date in the agenda.
Syncing. It’s not always perfert. Too be honest I was testing it to it’s extreme. I had Meetings installed on my iPad, iPhone, MacBook and iMac and was swapping rapidly between the 4 in the creation of a single meeting. I imagine that in normal everyday use this wouldn’t be an issue - I’d only really be using one machine to write the agenda and another to take the minutes.
It would be useful to be able to change the Enter key to automatically create a new agenda item rather then using the hotkey each time.
As CSS is used to define the minutes agenda it would be more business like if you could define the formatting of the printed and emailed reports. E.g. Letter head, font etc.
From my initial experiments Meetings looks like its going to meet all my needs, the developers seem very response to queries and i’m sure have future plans to develop the suite. However the test of any software like this is in everyday use and that’s not something I can do until back at work in September. I’ll keep you updated at that point.
blakekathryn
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
