We've reduced the complexity of the existing publishing process for the agenda and meeting minutes.
Previously we had the stages “Draft”, “Review” and “Ready” all within the same process, but we have noticed that most of you don’t need this complex workflow, most of you simply want to share the agenda or minutes with the people in the meeting once they are ready. Therefore, we have made this process a lot simpler without removing any of the functionality for those of you who have more complex processes.
In this article, you will learn about
- Agenda and minutes publishing,
- Agenda and minutes draft sharing,
- Modifying visibility of agenda and minutes,
- Remaining meeting time,
- Agenda and minutes PDF,
- Further improvements,
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
With this new design, you can publish the agenda or minutes to everyone who can access the meeting with only a few clicks! You will also always have an overview of who has access to the agenda or minutes, choose if you want to send an email notification or not, and be informed if there are any unpublished changes to the agenda or minutes. Let’s take a look at publishing step by step.
- Click on the publish button in the footer of either the agenda or minutes tab, depending on what you want to publish
- In this popup, you can see whom the agenda or minutes will be published. All people who have access to the meeting, regardless of their role, will be able to see the agenda or minutes, but here you can get more information on whom those people are exactly.
- You can also choose if you want to send an email notification to the people you are publishing to by selecting the checkbox “Notify people via email”. If selected, you will be able to enter your personalised message if you’d like to. The email notification will also include a reminder to vote if you have votes set up inside the meeting.
- Once published, in the subheader of the agenda or minutes you will be able to see the sharing status (Published) as well as who you have published the meeting to.
- If you click on the visibility summary in the subheader it will open up a popup where you can see all people that have access to the agenda or minutes.
- If you make any changes to the agenda or minutes after publishing, then the people in the meeting will still only see the version you published to them previously, and you will have to republish the agenda or minutes again to reflect the changes. The publish button will turn dark blue (instead of orange) to alert you that there are unpublished changes made to the agenda or minutes. You will also see that the status of the agenda or minutes changes to “Unpublished changes”. You can always see when the meeting was last published next to the publish button in the footer.
If your processes are a little bit more complex, and you for example need to share the agenda or minutes only with a few people first with or without their formal approval, the place for you to start is with “Share draft”. By using the share draft workflow, you will be able to select exactly who the agenda or minutes should be shared with, and you will also be able to select for each individual if they need to approve the agenda and minutes or not. All changes made to the agenda or minutes will be automatically shared, so you don’t need to keep track of shared versions. Let’s take a look at what the “Share draft” process looks like step by step.
- Click on the share draft button in the footer of either the agenda or minutes tab, depending on what you want to share.
- In this popup, you will be able to select who the agenda or minutes should be shared with. All people with edit permission will have access to the agenda or minutes by default, but you will be able to select or deselect any person who has view permission to the meeting regardless of their role.
- Once you’ve selected who you want to share the agenda or minutes with, you are able to select if you want their formal approval or not.
- You can also choose if you want to send an email notification to the people you are sharing the agenda or minutes with by selecting the checkbox “Notify people via email”. If selected, you will be able to enter your own personalised message as well if you’d like to. The email notification will also include a reminder to approve, if you have selected that you would like the people to submit their approval.
- Once shared, in the subheader of the agenda or minutes you will be able to see the sharing status as well as who you have shared the agenda or minutes with. The sharing status will be either “In approval” or “Draft” depending on if you’ve selected that you want people to approve the agenda/minutes or not.
- If you click on the visibility summary in the subheader it will open up a popup where you can see all people that have access to the agenda or minutes and if they have submitted their approval or not.
You can easily make changes to who can see the agenda or minutes simply by clicking on the “Edit visibility” button in the footer. You might need to unpublish the agenda/minutes and then select who you want to share the agenda/minutes with, but this step will only be required if you have previously published the agenda or minutes. Either way, the popup will take you through the steps you need to perform to change the people you share it with.
In the footer you are able to see how much time you have left to allocate to agenda items and with the current allocation when your meeting will end. Now this information will no longer take up space in the middle of the screen, so you will have more space to craft the agenda, whilst still having the information at hand when you need it.
You used to be able to add the minutes PDF note in the publishing modal, but now you will be able to add it when you generate the minutes PDF instead.
If you want to add more information to the agenda PDF, then simply use the “Purpose of meeting” field in the meeting details section.
Getting a better overview of which meetings are shared or not
With this update, you will be able to see the sharing status of both your agenda and minutes on the meeting list. Please take a look at the sharing status column of your table, you’ll be able to switch if you want to look at the agenda or minutes status in the header. You can also filter on the sharing status to only look at meetings which are for example in approval or have unpublished changes.
What happened to downloading PDFs?
Downloading PDFs has been moved to the top right corner of the meeting, and when clicked, it will open up a popup where you can select which type of PDF you would like to download.
Clearer meeting history and notification center
The meeting history will show when the agenda or minutes were either shared or published and to whom. You will also be able to see what type of changes that were made to the meeting since the last time it was shared or published, i.e. which items that were added, removed or edited in between sharing or publishing instances.
The notification center will also provide information on which notifications were sent when either sharing or publishing the agenda or minutes.
Q: What happens to already existing meetings?
A: All existing meetings will be migrated 1:1 to the new logic and status. There are no actions needed from the user side and no data will be lost.
Q: What has happened to the orange publish button?
A: The button will no longer turn orange, but instead be a dark blue when there is something you still haven’t published. If all updates of the agenda or minutes are published, then the publish button will have a white background.
Q: Will I still be in control at all times of what status the agenda or minutes are?
A: Yes. You can always change the status of the agenda or the minutes by following the respective process (share draft or publish).
Q: What will no longer be possible with “Simplified Agenda and Minutes Publishing” that is possible today?
A: We will remove the comments icon at the bottom right, which opens the comments section in a side panel. Dedicated navigation icons to open a side panel don’t work. The better approach is to let users click on the summarised content/icon and then expand the side panel with more information.
Q: How do I open comments?
A: Possibility to open the comments side panel with the icon on the bottom right. No comments icon on the bottom left, but the side panel can still be opened with the comments icon on the row of the agenda item.