Virtual board room (also known as board portal) is the decentralized remote software for top managers, designed for meetings and company governance in secure conditions.
The software provides remote access 24/7 to every board member and a toolkit for secure, quick and simple file using and sharing.
What Is Virtual Board Room Created for?
Virtual board software is a good option to accelerate governance processes, prevent errors and implement best solutions in a convenient and reliable way.
Virtual board portal was created for all aspects of company governance. But it can be used in any sphere, where there’s a demand in:
- common discussions and strategic decisions,
- voting,
- safe information sharing.
Therefore virtual board room is also helpful for charity, social projects, investments and other fundraising.
Virtual Board Room Functionality
Virtual board room contains programs and plugins for all needs of an average company and includes:
- Agenda programs.
- Committee management applications.
- Board room members lists, generally names, positions and contacts.
- Personal virtual rooms for an online board meeting.
- Software for discussing and voting.
- File management programs and file readers.
- Coworking plugins, change tracking and previous versions saving.
- Device and OS versions.
- Security complex: multilayer encryption, protected document storage and virtual data rooms.
- Access management.
The market offers a rather wide range of virtual board rooms. The most popular ones are Convene, iBabs, Govrn, OnBoard and Wrike. You can read virtual boardroom overviews at boardroommind.com.
The Best Way to Use Virtual Board Room
Virtual board room is complex and advanced software. But it’s simple and convenient for both managers and users when it’s properly configured and handled.
You can use the virtual board room in full force with these only 5 tips. They will open up main possibilities to save your time and money, prevent losses and mistakes.
1. Choose wisely
To use board room successfully, first of all you need to choose the best one for your company from the very beginning. Evaluate your board management software, find its jams, the process parts, where you waste time and money.
Compare board rooms of different providers and select the one that fixes as many of these vulnerabilities as possible. If managers have troubles with paper work, use a board room with the smart paperless meeting solution. If board members are always late, your choice is a board room with well-developed scheduling tools.
2. Ensure Versatile Compatibility
Your board portal software must have versions for all popular devices and operational systems: desktops, laptops, smartphones for Windows, Android, Mac OS and iOS. Choose such one from the very beginning. If you had to select the one with unique features, but for Windows desktops only, you may try to ask your provider to develop and include new versions in the standard package.
3. Configure ASAP
Configure a board room immediately after its creation. These steps will prevent mess in future, therefore they will save a lot of time and money on error tracking and correcting.
- Check backup and log settings before giving access to anyone, activate those you need. Therefore you track every users’ or software actions.
- Fulfill a member list. Make sure that every director or manager received a login and a password, all necessary links and permissions.
- It’s recommended to allow access to all virtual rooms and committees using one login. Also allow the system to remember users.
- Check default permissions for user and guest accounts and change them in case of need.
- Allow the preliminary access to documents – it’s the proper way for board members to prepare for meetings.
4. Automate Everything
Activate all plugins for routine processes. Board portal software provides a good toolkit to speed up your top managers’ work. For example:
- Software for automatically encrypting, sorting, storing and searching documents, downloaded for meetings. It saves hours and days on preparing necessary data.
- Navigation tools to pass from one page to another and between page’s parts.
- Selection and annotation tools: highlighters, sticky notes, electronic pen compatibility.
- Tools for simple calculations.
- Macroses allow you to automate simple work processes, specific for particular company, position or kind of task.
- Cluster updates allow to receive notifications about upgrades and immediately implement them without reloading all board room.
After plugins implementation, test them with a small amount of data to ensure that they work properly.
5. Fix and Improve
A boarding room can be configured improperly, face users’ errors or bugs during new updates or become ineffective in new circumstances. In this case an administrator needs to find out the reasons for failures and fix mistakes by any origin that can cost huge losses to a company. His best helpers are log files: analyzing them, an administrator can guess what to look for and what to change.
Some boarding rooms contain feedback programs and plugins, and administrators can get information directly from boarding members. They also can use chats or even comments.
Virtual board room is a powerful technology, and, used in a proper way, it can bring big benefits to any company.