iPROT is designed to allow you to create your meeting minutes directly during a meeting and send them immediately at the touch of a button. Of course, you can also use iPROT to write meeting minutes after the meeting has concluded. In any case, certain preparatory work is necessary for meetings, which you can best complete with iPROT directly in a preliminary version of the subsequent meeting minutes. In this article, you will learn how to optimally prepare your next meeting minutes in five steps and create an agenda version of the minutes.
Step 1 – Create New Meeting Minutes
First, to create new meeting minutes, open the New meeting dialog (accessible by clicking the + New meeting button at the top left).
In this dialog, first enter the meeting topic and then select the meeting type in which the new minutes should be categorized. If you are already creating follow-up minutes for an existing meeting, the meeting type will be automatically adopted by iPROT and displayed in the designated selection field.
Now enter the so-called metadata for the minutes (available fields are location, start, and end). As soon as you enter the start of a meeting, iPROT suggests the current system date and time and adds 2 hours for the end of the meeting, which is immediately displayed in the designated input fields.
The date in the Start and End fields can be entered either directly via the keyboard in the DD.MM.YYYY format, or conveniently using the calendar selection field that appears when you click into the date input field.
Step 2 – Define Participants and Mailing List
One text field is provided for participants and mailing list in the dialog. These two text fields are equipped with automatic completion. This means that as soon as you type the first letters of a name, a selection field appears with names from the user directory that contain the entered letters in the first and/or last name. With a simple click on the desired name, it is inserted into the respective text field and highlighted. You can delete the respective person from the participant and/or mailing list by clicking the X in the highlight (to the right of the name).
Additional participants who are not yet stored in the iPROT user directory can be quickly created using the + New Participant … button. To do this, you only need to enter the first name, last name, and email address and confirm by clicking the button on the far right. The entered person then appears among the attendees and is thus automatically included in the mailing list. Furthermore, the new participant is added to the iPROT user directory.
Step 3 – Appointment Preview and Notes
In the Notes field, which you can access via the button of the same name at the top left, you can enter notes and, for example, a date for the follow-up meeting.
Tip: If you want to send the preliminary version of the minutes to the meeting participants for information, enter a note in the Notes field indicating that this is a preliminary or agenda version and not yet final meeting minutes. This is illustrated as an example in the screenshot below.
A so-called disclaimer, with which you can, for example, establish a deadline for objections to the minutes, can be entered in the system settings. This disclaimer is then optionally displayed below the mailing list and notes on the first page or at the end of the minutes.
By clicking the Save button, the new minutes are created.
Step 4 – Create and Prepare Meeting Topics
Next, you should briefly review the topics and entries from previous meetings that are still open, which iPROT automatically transfers to the new minutes in accordance with the continuous minutes method. Any topics and entries that have already been completed can be marked as completed by clicking the checkbox for the respective entry and/or topic. Topics and entries marked as completed are initially hidden by iPROT, but can be displayed again with the setting Show completed topics & entries.
Visually, completed topics or entries are displayed in gray text and can thus be immediately distinguished graphically from new or not yet completed topics and entries.
New topics and entries that are already known in advance, for example based on an agenda, can be created in the middle column by clicking + New topic or in the right column by clicking + New entry.
Step 5 – Create Agenda Version of the Minutes
If you want to send the preliminary version of the minutes to the meeting participants for information, you can create an agenda version of the minutes with iPROT.
To do this, click the Meeting minutes (Preview) button in the menu at the top left.
iPROT then creates a PDF file of the preliminary version of the minutes, which you can download. You can now attach this preliminary version of the minutes as an attachment to a meeting invitation as an agenda and send it to the participants via email.
