Board portal software is revolutionizing the way board meetings have traditionally been conducted. It is making board meetings much more productive, expediting processes and allows for better decision making. In this article, we will discuss all of the various ways boardroom portals can make your meetings more productive as well as some of the features you will be able to find in all of the boardroom software out there.
Board Software for Board of Directors Meetings
Boardroom portals are secure areas where members of the board of directors can meet and make important decisions just like in a physical location. In fact, the biggest benefits of using boardroom software is that it saves you the unnecessary costs and wasted time of having to travel to a particular location to participate in a meeting. The board portal is equipped with the latest communication features that will; allow you to participate in a meeting without missing a beat.
The board portal will meet international security standards such as ISO/IEC 27001:2013, SOC2, HIPPA, and many other security credentials. Also, it will protect your information from security threats with data encryption, two-factor authentication, real-time data backup, and other features. This will give you peace of mind knowing that the data room is impenetrable to hackers and even offer worst-case scenario protection such as disaster recovery and real-time data backup. This is much safer than storing your files with a cloud service provider such as Google Drive or Dropbox. They will not even come close to the security features offered by board portals and are prime targets for hackers.
While many business professionals are worried about hackers stealing their information, they often overlook an equal threat, but one that comes from within called corporate espionage. Without a board portal, board meeting participants are free to download, print and share materials, which could be sensitive in nature, and you will never know about it. The board portal will protect your documents with watermarks which will contain the name of the user who accessed the document, date of access and the IP address. By the way, you will have the option to restrict access to the board portal by IP address. As a worst case scenario, you will be able to shred a document remotely in the event that it is leaked.
The bottom line is that the board portal gives you peace of mind knowing that your data is secure and mitigate the risks of legal action that may result if a certain piece of information is leaked. Since all of the participants will be aware that any leak will be easily traced back to them, it will discourage them from leaking information in the first place.
The Features that Different BoardRooms Provide
Board portals usually offer the following features:
Flexible storage – The board portal will be able to handle virtually any volume of storage thus allowing you to upload things that take up a lot of space such as videos or any massive files that you may have. Furthermore, you will be able to upload all of the documents necessary for the meeting beforehand, which will allow all of the participants to study the materials and come to the meeting better prepared. Do not worry about wasting time uploading lots of documents since you will be able to upload them all in bulk.
Central document repository – The board portal is a good place to store all of your documents since it is secure and they will be available to team members whenever they need them. This eliminates all of the time wasted on having to request information, waiting for the person to send it to you and then having to wait again for the document owner to grant you permission to view the document which is the way Google Docs work. With a board portal, you will be able to find the documents you need quickly by using features such as full-text search and optical character recognition.
Granular access permissions – Some of the documents you upload into the board portal may not be appropriate for everybody to view. Therefore you will be able to determine who can see which information and what they can do with it i.e. edit, download print, etc. Dome of the most innovative data rooms will allow you to achieve an even greater level of granularity by offering secure spreadsheet viewing. Let’s say that you upload an Excel spreadsheet into the board portal. You would like everybody to see the information in the spreadsheet, but not the formulas that were used for calculation. This is possible with boardroom software.
Q&A module – If anybody has a question, they will be able to ask it ink the data room. Conducting your communication inside the data room is more secure than through email or instant message services and it allows you to keep your information and communication together in one place. Furthermore, the question will have statuses which show all of the participants whether the question has been answered and it can even produce an FAQ sheet which allows you to avoid having to answer the same question over and over again.
Complete audit trail – The data room will keep track of every action performed inside the data room and will include information and which user viewed which documents and for how long. It will even tell you what they searched for. The system will also produce reports for you so you will be able to get the big picture about what is going on inside the data room.
Give board portals a try and you will be amazed at the level of comfort and productivity it offers. In fact, you will wonder how you ever got along without it.