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Making meetings more useful

Last Updated 22 February 2015, 18:07 IST

We all know that meetings are vital to doing business. They can also be difficult, slow or argumentative affairs. But tools to help speed up or even enhance your roundtable discussions are now readily available.

Meetings - Notebooks for Work, which is $4 (Rs 248) for iPad, can transport your meeting into the 21st century. It is essentially a meeting companion that acts like a smart notebook.

To plan and carry out a meeting, you add a new entry to the app’s notebook and enter basic information like meeting name, time and date. That starts a kind of meeting log that you can search later to find notes.

You can make a list of attendees and plan out agenda items ahead of time. When you’re in the meeting, the app acts as a digital notepad. It has handy shortcuts that insert bullet points or time stamps into your notes, and you can even add photos. There’s a neat action-items system that lets you describe actions to be taken and assign responsibility and due dates.

The app is simple and has some nice touches, like being able to put a password lock on meeting notes. While not the most sophisticated or smartest app ever made, it works well and is unfussy and businesslike in design.

Meeting Minutes Pro is broadly equivalent, with some useful extra features like being able to export your notes in a file compatible with Microsoft Word. It is fast and clean and, unlike some Android apps, is regularly updated by its makers. It costs $4 (Rs 248), but there is a free three-day trial version.

The Popular Meeting Assistant is similar to Meetings - Notebooks for Work, but more sophisticated. The developers call it a complete app for planning and running meetings, and while it is designed with salespeople in mind, it can also be useful for other types of meetings. The app has a section for creating agendas, and it links to social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter to gather information on your meeting attendees so you can put a face to a name if it’s the first time you’re meeting in person.

Meeting Assistant’s note-taking system automates some of the formatting, and it integrates with your device’s calendar. The app has a distinctive design, with large graphics and icons in muted colors. And it has a few clever touches; you can email memos to attendees from inside the app, for example. But while the core app with basic functionality is $10 (Rs 620) on iOS and free on Android, the full range of features can cost as much as $3 (Rs 186) a month on subscription. I also find its menu system a little confusing.

Planning conference calls or videoconferences with attendees in different time zones can be a headache. TimePal - Easy Meeting Planner Across Time Zones, a $2 (Rs 124) iOS app, is essentially an interactive calendar with a world clock built in. You enter a list of cities where your attendees are, and the app shows you the relevant times, so you can see that an 11 am meeting in London is going to be tiresome for attendees in New York, who’ll have to be available at 6 am.

You select a time window for the meeting, and email attendees with options and a summary of the meeting. It’s a simple app, but potentially a very powerful one.
Schedule Planner is not a meeting planner but a useful project tool, free for iOS and Android. It is essentially a smart calendar with a graphics-heavy design. You can plan timed tasks and whole days of work by assigning colour-coded category titles to your tasks.

Graphs can show you how many of the tasks in each category were completed. Schedule Planner does its relatively simple job well and could help small teams keep on top of their work. The free version of the app is limited, however, and you must pay $7 (Rs 434) to unlock the full range of features.

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(Published 22 February 2015, 18:07 IST)

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