Effective meetings. Effortless organization.
Many of us spend countless hours engaged in meetings. When properly managed, meetings should produce meaningful results: relevant information, agreements, next steps, ...
Minutes App has been designed to make your meetings more effective, and keep all your information organized, right at hand.
Because some of the most useful but elusive habits simply require the proper tool.
Effective meetings
Minutes App supports and incentives the best practices of effective meeting management
Prepare your Meetings
Before entering a meeting, have a clear view on what is its purpose and what is the outcome you want to achieve. Being conscious of your ultimate goals helps you prevent side discussions and deviate from the original purpose of the meeting. Minutes will create a Preparation Space for each of your notes that you can use to quickly note down your key objectives before the meeting.
Track Actions
During the meeting, capture all relevant actions and store them for subsequent follow up. Check that this actions are aligned with the true purpose of the meeting. While you take your notes, Minutes will help you quickly note down actions, assign responsible and set deadlines.
Manage Time
Always keep a reference of time during the meeting to ensure that the discussions flow according to the time available. Minutes provides a convenient Timer during meetings that will keep you informed of the remaining time and flag the last minutes of your meetings.
Share Conclusions
During wrap up, review the main conclusions and actions and distribute them among the attendants for future reference. Minutes provides one-click distribution of your meeting notes thanks to its integration with your email and contacts.
Effortless Organization
When a tool is properly designed and integrated with your core applications, organization becomes effortless.
Calendar and Contacts Integration
Create notes from your calendar events to automatically import title, date, location, attendants and agenda details.
Threaded Recurrent Meetings
Minutes allows you to create new instances of existing meetings, grouping them in a threaded view that allows you quickly review and follow up on open topics from previous sessions. This results in an extremely effective tool to manage recurrent committees.
Meetings Lists Grouped by Date
Minutes are conveniently shown in chronological order and grouped by date, showing meetings from the last 7 days, last 30 days, ... Easily implement the healthy habit of reviewing your meeting notes at the end of the week, making sure you don't miss essential information or lose track of relevant actions.
New 1.3 Features
Minutes App 1.3 introduces new useful features: formatting options, a smarter timer and better tracking of previous actions
Formatting Tools
Minutes App introduces a demanded feature: improved formatting options. With its new formatting buttons, you can now specify some of the most used styles in meeting minutes;
- Header
- Outline, including the ability to indent or unindent items.
- Comment, subtly highlighting the paragraph in a different color. (Many users are inheriting notes from previous meetings or agendas, and want to highlight paragraphs as a mean to identify them as actual comments to existing notes).
Header and Comment buttons share the same physical space and are accessible through its sliding design. Simply slide right or left to reveal the two options.
Minutes formatting tools follow a pseudo-markdown syntax in edit mode and is translated into a fully formatted text in view mode and in the meeting minutes.
A smarter timer
Version 1.3 introduces a smarter timer for your meetings. The timer is now integrated in the title bar and automatically initiated when you are in a meeting. As usual, it will flash orange when 20% and red at 10% of the meeting is left.
Timer is now actionable by tapping on it and it will let you:
- Stop the timer.
- Resume the timer for the meeting.
- Initiate a custom timer, to allow you to track individual sections of the meeting.
Pending actions from previous meetings
During recurrent meetings, it is very common to follow up on existing open items from previous sessions. Minutes App facilitates this by conveniently organising recurrent meetings in a threaded view. In version 1.3, a new convenient method has been introduced: when you create or view a specific instance of a recurrent meeting, the Follow Up Actions show a new section 'Pending actions from previous meetings'. This section shows you all the open items from existing instances prior to the one you are viewing. This section is also actionable: tap an item to complete, view its details, change it.
OmniFocus Integration
Minutes App 1.1 allows you to send your follow up actions to OmniFocus. Learn how and more importantly... why.
Core set of tools
The iPad proves to be a valuable productivity device thanks to a core set of applications:
- Mail, as an essential communication tool.
- Calendar, as a key tool to manage our time: scheduled events or time related actions.
- Task Manager, as a core application, no matter your choice, to track and organize your pending actions.
If meetings are an essential part of your business activity, then Minutes App can become a core tool in your set of apps too. For this reason, Minutes App is designed to be tightly integrated with this core suite of tools, which results in a streamlined workflow where the app gets out of your way and allows you to focus on the key objectives: making your meetings more effective and keeping your meeting information organized.
Send to OmniFocus
If you are using OmniFocus, you can export your follow up actions by simply tapping on an action to see its detail. On the top bar, if you have OmniFocus installed, you will see a new 'Send to OmniFocus' button. This button creates a new task in OmniFocus and details on its notes the meeting it comes from.
iOS 6 release notes
Version 1.2 of Minutes App is already available in the App Store, fully compliant with iOS 6.
Compatibility of Version 1.1 with iOS 6
There are 2 issues identified when executing version 1.1 of Minutes App under iOS 6.
- Layout. When the application is launched, the layout of the list of meetings is wrongly displayed. This can be easily corrected by rotating the device to reset the layout.
- Permissions. As of iOS 6, your iPad will ask for permissions to access personal data. In the case of Minutes App, some features rely on the access to Contacts and Calendar information. Version 1.1 of the app will be unable to access these data and therefore you will not be able to create a note from a calendar event, for instance.
While none of these two issues make the application unusable, the result can be annoying and the app can be less effective due to lack of integration with core services.
Version 1.2 of Minutes App is already available, please update for full compatibility with iOS 6.
Support
Please feel free to ask questions, report a problem or share your thoughts.
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