MinuteBase

A quick post to bring you up-to-date on the latest enhancements to MinuteBase.

Emails

We’ve spruced up the template of our minutes and agenda emails, so it’s much closer to the look and feel of the website. We know how much people love the email feature and we wanted to give everyone the best experience. We’ve also made improvements to clearly distinguish between a meeting agendas and minutes.

Sign-in

Many of you requested the ability to sign-in from the front page of the site. You can now find your account and we’ll redirect you to your company or organization’s sign-in page.

People page

We’ve improved the People section to handle the thousands of contacts you imported. The new format allows for longer names, companies and job titles too. There’s a search just above the listing so you can quickly find anyone you’re looking for.

Meeting Agendas

Some of you need long descriptive agendas for your meetings, we’ve tweaked the editor so that it automatically expands as needed and improved the minutes format.

Changing from agenda to minutes

Finally, we’ve replaced the manual selector used to distinguish whether a document was an agenda or minutes. If you’ve added any minutes to a meeting and the meeting date has passed, your document is automatically changed from being a agenda to minutes.

If you have any suggestions or questions, please contact us on our support site, or leave us a comment right here.

MinuteBase has been receiving plaudits from around the web, here’s a round up of the coverage:

Not everybody can have a secretary as diligent as Pepper Potts, the infallible right hand of Tony Stark. Lesser mortals have to strive themselves in order to keep their meeting minutes up to scratch… or do they?

KillerStartups

Looking for a new way to create and distribute meeting minutes? You might give MinuteBase a try.

IAAP-HQ

Meetings, agendas, and note-taking are a part of every good business. A tedious part. This is where the folks at MinuteBase come, in–their online meeting organizer deserves a hard look if constant meetings are an unavoidable part of your life.

thehustletownchronicle.com

Briefly Noted

• Feedmyapp
• eHub / Planet Ajaxian
• web2nukk

Tweeted

Setting up this weeks meeting agenda for #cfoanz with @minutebase. This is slick stuff

@neurotic

In response to ”what are your essential tools/apps are for running your biz”.

Freshbooks and now MinuteBase. For large projects, BaseCamp of courseq

@ThatScottGuy

The interface feels as if designed by Cupertino

@jessenf

For managing meetings, it is super awesome

@jessenf

This looks like an absolutely fantastic application!

@annawann

We’ve also received some great ideas and feedback from the support site and have some exciting updates coming.

Thanks to everyone who’s using MinuteBase.

We’ve just deployed an update to MinuteBase which allows you to import contacts from a file. It was the number one most requested feature and we’ve worked swiftly to implement it.

You can now import your contacts from Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and Apple Address Book.

The process should also work with any application which supports vCard or Outlook CSV formats.

From the People section click the Add People menu, under the Import Contacts sidebar select the format of the file.

CSV requires that you map your contacts to MinuteBase’s fields, whilst vCard works automatically.

In case you run into any issues you can easily undo the process.

Thanks to all the users who requested the feature, your feedback is very much appreciated.

Update: We’ve added Knowledge Base articles with documentation on exporting from Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and Apple Address Book.

There’s a great write up of MinuteBase on Lifehacker.

“MinuteBase can do a whole lot of things, so if you work in a meeting-intensive environment you’ll definitely want to check it out.”

Read the Lifehacker review

A number of MinuteBase users have asked whether it was possible to distinguish between agendas that were being prepared and minutes that had been taken. We’ve now added a feature so that you can select when a meeting moves from the agenda phase to minutes.

When editing there is now a drop-down menu under the meeting title, which allows you to select between agenda and minutes.

On the meetings page and dashboard an agenda icon will appear next to meeting titles.

We’re pleased to announce that a major new version of MinuteBase has just gone live. We’d like to outline a few of the changes and welcome your feedback.

We’ve been working hard on improving the look and feel of the site. We think the new design is cleaner, more spacious and simpler to navigate. Although we haven’t changed the general layout of the site, we have made enhancements to the minute writing and privacy controls which are outlined below:

Minute Writing

Attendees, categories and meeting description have been moved out of the sidebar and into the main writing area under the Cover Sheet section, which also contains the minutes approval button.

The Summary sidebar now only contains agenda headings. There’s a new Actions section in the main minute writing area, that shows a summary and statistics for all the actions from a meeting, broken down by the person they are assigned to.

There’s a new Files section which groups all the files within a meeting together.

The Take Minutes button has been moved from the top navigation to above the sidebar summary, and sits along side buttons for Email, PDF download and Print. Like the summary these stay in position even when you scroll down your meeting minutes.

Privacy

We’ve improved the privacy controls so that by default only attendees can view the minutes of a meeting. You can now opt to share the minutes with people who were not present at the meeting by going to the Privacy tab and adding them there.

Previously, all users had access to every meeting in the account. We’ve now locked it down so that users can only see meetings that they are attendees of or have been explicitly allowed access. This makes it much more useful for multiple teams using the same account as you can be sure that only the people you want are reading the minutes.

We’ve now enabled SSL access, so you can access your account using https://your-account.minutebase.com safe in the knowledge that all data is being transmitted encrypted, just like your online banking. You can also force secure access to ensure that everyone who uses your account is accessing it with SSL.

Feedback and Support

We hope you like the changes, we are always striving to improve MinuteBase, we welcome your feedback and questions. With that in mind, we have moved our Knowledge Base, Feedback and Help to a new provider which should be much more useful than the previous site. If you have any suggestions, or find any issues, please click the Support link at the top of the page and let us know.

We’ve been quiet for far too long, working on some exciting updates to MinuteBase. We had originally planned a set of small rolling releases, but because of the interconnected nature of many of the improvements our schedule was pushed back. Over the coming days we’ll be diving into the detail, but for now here’s a little taster:

Faster, Simpler

We’ve optimised MinuteBase so it’s significantly quicker, combined the Users and People areas and simplified the navigation throughout the site.

Activity Feed

We’ve overhauled the Activity Feed and made it much more useful. Rather than a purely chronological stream we’ve introduced meeting headings and larger activity icons which substantially improve its readability.

See before:

…And after:

We’ll be adding new activity types including invites and emails to the Activity Feed shortly.

Approvals and Stats

Speaking of which, when minutes are sent out you need to know that they have been read. Attendees reading minutes can now approve them either on the site itself, or from an emailed version. You don’t need to be a MinuteBase user to approve email minutes either, they can be sent to anyone of your choosing.

Approvals and outstanding actions are now logged and their stats are clearly displayed at the top of your online minutes.

You can drill down to see who has approved and how many of their actions remain.

Invites and Emails

MinuteBase now has a greatly enhanced Invites system which has been woven into the People area. That not only makes the site easier to navigate - all the expected info is in one place - but allows admins sophisticated control of invites. It’s now easier than ever for your colleagues to start using MinuteBase.

Emailing minutes has also had a makeover, with a more spacious email sending page of its own replacing the rather cramped pop up window.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of all the changes, so stay tuned for more details. As always your feedback is very welcome.

As part of our continuing quest to buff MinuteBase to gleaming perfection we have been working to improve commenting within minutes.

With our latest update we’ve delivered these improvements:

Unread comments are now highlighted in jade green:

Comment entry has been moved from a dialog box to inside the minutes:

Comments can now be deleted by Administrators:

We think these substantially improve the comment features on MinuteBase and look forward to bringing you further minute writing updates shortly.

Today, we’re pleased to introduce enhancements to MinuteBase which will allow you to manage meeting attendees much more easily.

Quick Adding

You can now add a new person to a meeting, even if they aren’t in your MinuteBase account. In the Attendees section of Details tab simply type their name and press the New button.

That’s it, they’ve been added to your account; you can update details, such as their email address and contact numbers, in the People area.

You can also add attendees on the fly without leaving the minute taking page just by typing the name of an attendee and selecting them from the drop down menu.

We’ve implemented Quick Adding on the Add / Edit Meeting page too, enabling you to include new people and new categories with ease.

Update: Categories now have Quick Adding on the Details tab. Check back for further enhancements shortly.

Today, we’re pleased to announce several long-planned enhancements to minute writing and search on MinuteBase.

Unattributed Minutes

With this update we’ve introduced an unattributed option to the speakers in our editor.

As we noted in our first blog post, minute writing can take many forms. The first beta version of MinuteBase only allowed the creation of attributed minutes, in other words each minute had to have an associated speaker. We chose to do that because it enabled users to search for minutes by their speaker.

Attributed minutes work well for interviews and discussions, but in businesses and the public sector minute taking is more description than transcription. Even when attributed minutes are used there can be instances where the minute taker will want to use description.

Unattributed minutes are distinguished by omitting the speaker name and not indenting.

Improved Editor

We think that MinuteBase offers the simplest way to create clear and professional minutes, and we’re constantly striving to improve our tools. In particular we’ve been looking at enhancements to the MinuteBase editor. Previously, text entries over four lines resulted in a scroll bars appearing inside the editor, trying to write lengthier entries wasn’t as easy as it could be because the user wasn’t able to see everything they had typed. With this update the editor expands as needed and wraps round an entire text entry when it is edited.

We think you’ll agree - it’s a major improvement.

Keyboard Controls

The fastest way to use MinuteBase is with keyboard shortcuts. Along with the updates to the editor we’ve changed the add / update minute shortcut from Return to Shift + Return. We thought it was best to stay with convention and for Return to move to the next line when typing text minutes. See the tips section for more on keyboard shortcuts.

Enhanced Search

This update of MinuteBase enhances the integration of search throughout the site. Users can now filter meeting searches by category and month, people searches by company, and minute searches by speaker, month and minute type (text, action, file or link). Best of all, minute searches display entire minute entries exactly how they appear on the viewing and writing pages.

We hope you enjoy these updates, we’ve got much more planned. As always your feedback is greatly appreciated.