Review: MinuteBase

MinuteBase is a web application designed for planning meetings and writing up minutes.  It helps focus meetings with an agenda, and provides lots of ways of collecting notes and other related information.

Each meeting can have several attendees, and they can be added as users to your MinuteBase account.  This makes MinuteBase a good tool for communicating agendas before meetings to help keep discussions focused.  Attendees can also see minutes (which have privacy controls), so meetings can be followed up with relevant actions.  Minutes can also accept comments for later discussion.

Text, actions, files, links and agendas can be appended to each agenda item.  This makes MinuteBase a good central location for information produced during a meeting.

Design

There’s some great attention to detail in MinuteBase’s design.  It also uses a lot of white space, so pages feel clean and easy to understand.

Here’s what the dashboard page looks like when you sign in:

The dashboard makes it easy to add a new meeting and see existing ones.  It also has some useful inline documentation:

I particularly like the search widget:

Minutes can be displayed in view or edit modes.  The edit mode has intuitive hover effects which make it easy to insert items at any position, or edit existing items:

The PDF export for minutes is also excellent.

Conclusions and Pricing

I’ve had many meetings where internal systems were used to collect data, which is difficult to access outside of the office unless you can use a VPN.  MinuteBase would be perfect for teams collaborating across different companies or departments.  It would also help in meetings where attendees are known to stray off-topic and overrun the allocated meeting time.

The only other things I’d like to see in MinuteBase are meeting timers and audio clips.  Most people find it hard to keep meetings on time, so it would be useful to have timers for each agenda item.  Additionally, although people have dedicated tools for recording audio in meetings, MinuteBase might appeal to certain corporate customers if it did that too.

Another thought I had was using MinuteBase for organising conference calls.  These can be awkward when working across company boundaries, so collecting attendees’ voip or telephone details inside MinuteBase would make a lot of sense.

The pricing varies between £10 and £50 a month, which seems like sensible pricing considering the types of customers who will use MinuteBase.