Paperless meetings: to each his own…meeting tool

Many organizations that have prioritized maintaining a paperless office also seek a digital-meeting tool. It is no secret that there are several ways to build such a tool, for instance, with SharePoint. You can share documents, take notes and compile summaries. And yet, optimal paperless meetings require more functionality. That is why we are eager to address the question we commonly hear: “What is the real difference between iBabs and SharePoint?”

Our list:

1. Clear overview per action point

We meet to make decisions and define action points. What is more convenient than to have the option to register them directly next to the agenda points? You can do that with iBabs. You provide action points and decisions with automatic features (metadata). Need an overview of all of the action points and decisions by subject, dossier, meeting, person in charge or meeting platform (for instance, MT)? No problem. Yours at the push of a button! If you work with SharePoint, you have to establish the features yourself and it is difficult to analyze the relationship between them.

2. Simple user interface

With iBabs, the meeting participant has the convenience of an app that orderly displays all meetings, agenda points and documents via a single, convenient interface! If you want to meet digitally using SharePoint, then you are stuck to watching the Sharepoint site in your browser.

3. Authorization setup

If you meet digitally, the security of the documents must be guaranteed. Perish the thought that the contents of the meetings leak out. You naturally want to provide insight into the meeting document only to those directly concerned, something that is a snap with iBabs! There is a standard authorization setup with iBabs. Handy as well: the participants can directly insert documents and meetings in iBabs straight from Outlook. With SharePoint? Then you need to come up with your own authorization setup.

4. Control over your amended documents

If you work with a number of colleagues on one document in SharePoint, you amend the document directly. That is perfect if you work together on a document. It is difficult, however, to make a distinction between the notes you want to keep private and those you want to share. With iBabs you have the choice to share amendments per document. You don’t change the document immediately, but first append notes. After that the document “owner” amends it in accordance to his or her own insight. That way you easily have control over all of the input and one person is responsible for the final version.

5. Offline meetings

Do you need to meet in a space without internet? Or they have it, but the connection is down? It makes it a challenge to meet, if your documents are in the cloud. If you meet with iBabs, you don’t need an internet connection. How flexible can you get?

Our tip: do you want to optimize your work? Use SharePoint to create documents (collaboratively) and for archiving, if necessary. Use iBabs for the administrative processing of the meeting materials you generate. Many of our clients use both tools!