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Mar 06
0

New Less Meeting Release – Making Meetings Easier to Manage

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Our spring release is out the door and chances are you’ve already noticed some of the changes around Less Meeting.

We started simplifying the meeting interface and also added a couple highly requested features to manage meeting invites.

Meeting Agenda Templates

Do you have the same template you use on all your sales calls? Want to share a standard status meeting template with your whole team?

New agenda templates let you create a standard agenda template and even share it with your team.

Agenda Template

Click “edit agenda” and choose Use an existing template or Save a new one

 

Resend Agendas & Invites

Often times empty meeting invites are added to the calendar to block off someone’s time. One of the unfortunate side effects of too many meetings!

We realize this is unavoidable, though, so want to make it easier for you to update meetings and communicate that to the rest of your team. Introducing the ability to send an updated meeting invite (including the .ICS file) and the ability to send the updated agenda to your attendees.

Updating the Meeting Invite

Updating the Meeting Invite
Update Invite

Check “Email Calendar Update” to resend the invite to attendees
Agenda Updates

Send your updated agenda to attendees

Simpler, Cleaner Notes & Minutes Interfaces

You’ll notice that the note taking interface is now more clean and inviting. We’ve cleaned out a lot of the noise including the multiple text boxes and excess labels. The result is a notes section letting you focus on what matters – the notes.

We’ve taken the popular drag & drop styles from the mobile apps and applied these to the web, so you should find it easier to drag & drop your notes, as well as the green note icon. Click & hold on any note – or the green note icon itself – and drag it to wherever you want it.

And when it’s time to send the meeting minutes, you’ll also notice a newly redesigned popup.

Sending Minutes

The redesigned Meeting Minutes interface

 

New PDF Export Format

Continuing with the theme of cleaner and simpler, the export to PDF has also been redesigned to match the styling of the export to Word.

Note that if the meeting hasn’t started you’ll still see the old format, which is designed for offline users who need to take notes by hand and enter them back into Less Meeting later.

Undo Deleted Meetings

Delete a meeting on accident?

Here’s how you can add back, or undelete, any of your meetings:

  1. Visit your Meetings page and check the “Deleted/Declined” filter option
  2. Click the “Remove Meetings” link
  3. You’ll notice a green “+” icon next to your deleted meeting – click this and your meeting will be re-added
Undelete meeting

Click the green “+” icon to readd your meeting

 

Let us know what you think of all these new features and as always, thanks for all the feedback that helped us plan this release.

 

Aug 01
0

How To: Add Agendas & Tags to Google Calendar Meeting Invites

Posted by | Using Less Meeting | 2 Comments

We’ve been asked a few times recently how to add Tags and Agendas to meetings in Google Calendar.

Sounds like a perfect topic for a blog post.

Why Add a Plan in Google Calendar?

Sure you can add tags & agendas directly in Less Meeting. Do this in Google Calendar when you create your invite, though, and reduce the number of steps it takes to create a new meeting.

And if you’re trying to run better meetings, you’ll also know that sending out the meeting plan to attendees before the meeting is a must.

Ok I’m In, How Do I Add a Plan to GCal?

It’s super straight forward. Just follow these 2 steps:

1. Sync your Less Meeting & Google Calendar accounts. Do that here

2. Type out your Agenda & Tags in the description, like this:

How to Format Your Agenda & Tags

When typing out your plan there are some simple format requirements.

Agendas
– Start with the text, “Agenda:”
– Add the agenda number followed by a right parenthesis. Like this, “1)”, “2)”, and so on
– Optional: add each agenda length. Format is “(X min)” where X is the number of minutes
– Optional: add sub-agendas. Format is “- ” followed by the title

Tags
– Start with the text, “Tags:”
– Separate each tag with a comma
– Add as many tags as you want

That’s all there is to it. Less Meeting does the rest, automatically reading your plan and adding it to your meeting.

Enjoy!

Jul 10
0

Looking for Less Meeting iPad Beta Testers

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It’s almost here. We’re putting the finishing touches on the Less Meeting iPad app and will start beta testing it soon. And not long after that we’ll releasing it to all of you.

Can’t wait that long though? Or just want to be the first to check it out?

We have a limited number of beta testing slots available for existing Less Meeting users. So if you want in, drop us a line to staff@lessmeeting.com or ping us on Twitter @LessMeeting and we’ll add you to our beta team.

image via bfishadow

Jun 12
0

Train Your Users So They Keep Coming Back

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Less Meeting does a ton of cool things. Did you know you can customize your meeting minutes with the exact colors & logo of your company?

We tell you about as many – of these things – as we can. There’s even an interactive tutorial to help make it easier to run better meetings.

Yet if we told you about some of our favorite features, how often would you say, “I didn’t know you could do that!!” (ok so the exclamation might not be necessary)

How can we make sure that doesn’t happen?

Walk Before You Run – Taking the Time to Learn a New Tool Does Matter

image via esbjorn2

A recent article from Wayne Turmel points out the somewhat obvious, yet often ignored fact, that many users of new online tools never learn how to use the tool.

You can guess what kind of effect this has on new users. Well, for starters they’re probably no longer your users.

As Wayne describes,

Most [users] don’t see how the features are useful or understand the possibilities…Of those [users] who do, many will do the bare minimum to accomplish what they need…[Only] a brave few will push through and learn to communicate effectively with the tools at their disposal.

Not knowing how to get the most out of a tool creates a less than stellar customer experience. That ain’t good!

And just to be clear, why do users need to be educated on the important features? What is it that happens to the majority of your new users who don’t really learn your tool? Well…

    • They get overwhelmed > so they quit
    • They don’t uncover the juicy features and don’t get the tool’s full benefit > so they quit

  • They make mistakes, causing rework & lost time > so they quit

 

Ummm…notice a theme?

Keep in mind that great design will overcome this problem a lot of the time. Simple and clear interfaces make the user experience intuitive. Or alternatively with very complex tools, new customers often get personalized on-site training.

But what about the middle ground? Your UX only goes so far, or on-site training doesn’t exactly fit into your business model? (Hint: a 50 page user manual is not the answer either.)

Let’s test this out on Less Meeting to see.

Our #1 feature is that we make it super easy to run better meetings. That means if we’re adding work to your meetings instead of saving you time, we’re not holding up our end of the bargain.

SO, how can we help you get the most out of Less Meeting? Would you watch a personalized Webinar? Want more guides and tutorials? In-app notifications? Or maybe we’re doing a decent job already…

We want to know. Tell us in the comments below, on twitter @LessMeeting, at staff@lessmeeting.com, or even call: 800.794.5209. 

image 2 via Girl Guides of Canada

Jul 26
0

How to CC Your Way to Better Meetings

Posted by | Meeting Tips, Using Less Meeting | No Comments
So you’ve signed up for LessMeeting and don’t know what to do next? You see a bunch of information about an Outlook plugin, but you don’t have Outlook! What are you supposed to do?Fortunately there are two alternatives to the Outlook plugin for generating meetings:

  1. CC or forward each of your calendar events to cc@lessmeeting.com
  2. Use the New Meeting button on the Dashboard and Meeting pages

Using the New Meeting button is pretty straightforward, so we’ll focus on using the CC functionality.

How to upload to LessMeeting when you are the meeting ORGANIZER

If you are the meeting organizer, create the meeting as you normally would.  The screenshot below will show this in Gmail, but you can use any other email provider such as Hotmail, or Yahoo!.
  1. Create the calendar event as you would normally by entering a time, subject, location, and description. Also add all of the attendees.
  2. Add the email address cc@lessmeeting.com to the list of attendees.
  3. At the bottom of the description include a numbered agenda (including sub-agenda items) with the time for each item with this format:Agenda:
    1. Agenda Item One (5 min)
    – Sub agenda one A
    – Sub agenda one B
    2. Agenda Item Two (2 min)
    3. Agenda Item Three (30 min)
  4. After the Agenda add tags in the following format:Tags: tag1, tag2
  5. Save and send the meeting.
  6. Go to the LessMeeting website (www.lessmeeting.com) to take meeting notes

If you can’t remember the cc@lessmeeting.com email address, it is displayed on the main Dashboard page after you login.

How to upload to LessMeeting when you are a meeting PARTICIPANT

Uploading a meeting when you are the participant is as easy as forwarding the invite to cc@lessmeeting.com. When you open the meeting on the website you’ll need to enter the agenda items unless the meeting organizer included the agenda in the original invite.Some other things to note:

  • Updates to the meeting time will be reflected on the LessMeeting website
  • Meetings that are deleted will be removed from the LessMeeting website
We hope that the “CC” functionality provides a good alternative to those of you that don’t use Outlook. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know by emailing staff@lessmeeting.com!