The following is a re-post of an article from my blog ProductivityPower.net. This article examines a good web based tool for you to get more out of your meetings by making it easier to take minutes. If you have any additional tools that you use please share with us in the comments below.
Taking meeting minutes is one of those painstaking tasks that you have to do. Minutes are the record of what actions items you and others have committed to doing. By capturing good minutes you will have an easier time processing the action items into your work flow than by relying on everything.
A lot of people find it difficult to take minutes. I think a large reason for this is that there is no one right way to do things. It’s the same reason why people find Linux much more difficult to use than Windows – there are just too many ways of doing the same thing.
If that is your problem then you need to check out this web service. It is still in beta which means that the various service plans are free until the end of beta, and they also have a free option that will always be free. The website bills itself as a meeting planning and documenting service meaning that it helps you to create agenda, take minutes and distribute those minutes to the attendees.
I created an account and played around with it for a bit. I can see the value in it and I think that once you get over the learning curve it could be a really valuable resource. My favorite feature is that I can download the minutes after I enter them as a PDF file.
The way I would use this website is to create the agenda and then export that to PDF. I would print it out and use that to capture the minutes. I would then enter the minutes into the website. I wish they had an OCR feature where I could scan in the minutes as TIFF images and upload those instead. Once the minutes are entered I would export as PDF, delete them from the site and then distribute the PDF via email.
The website can be found at http://www.minutebase.com. Check it out and tell me what you think by leaving a comment below, please.
Todd Lohenry 