With GoTo Meeting, hosting a productive online meeting is a piece of cake. But there’s a lot of collaboration required before and after a meeting happens which isn’t always so simple. If you’re stuck on some processes or workflows, there are a number of free apps out there that can help. Here are a few hacks using free tools to boost your pre and post meeting productivity!
Nothing is worse than trying to find a date and time for your web conference that suits everyone. Email chains explode out of control with “I’m on vacation” and “out of town on a conference” automatic replies. Doodle is a great free hack to solve this problem with an easy polling system. You can propose a period of time, from a specific hour or even a full week or month, and the other participants can opt-in to indicate when they are free for a meeting. It’s a great hack to short cut a long email thread of mixed availability.
Trello is an easy to use web-based tool that allows you to work collaboratively on projects. Think of it like an online pin board. Tasks are written on these cards and the cards are assigned to a person or a team. It’s simple for everyone involved to move the cards around on the board to different categories – for instance “planning” “in progress” and “done” – and add comments or labels to cards. This allows the whole team to get a quick overview of where everyone is in their particular tasks. So next time you’re prepping for a meeting about a particular project and need a status update, you can look at the active board for an update in real time. It’s also a great way to see stalls or gaps in progress, to address directly during the meeting.
This is a great cloud based server for securely collaborating and sharing documents related to your web conference. All you have to do is upload documents to their cloud and you decide who has access to the documents and if they can edit or view. This means every participant will have access to the correct, up to date documentation. You can also integrate Dropbox with Trello and instantly add important documents to Trello cards for your projects.
Create collaborative notes and minutes for your online meeting with Meetnotes. The freemium version has loads of templates for your meeting minutes, including one-on-one meeting and a SWOT. Participants can login and collaborate on the same meeting notes, which means you don’t need to spend time collecting notes from others and it ensures that important points raised in the meeting are never lost.
Slack is a powerful group messaging app that is proving to be a useful project collaboration tool. Simply create a new channel for each project so that the conversation stays focused, and meeting participants can communicate about projects in real time, in one central location. No more long email chains and everyone stays in the loop. It’s not only great for ongoing collaborations, it also integrates with many apps including Dropbox and Trello.