Many of the products we develop at Keystroke often satisfy an internal need. The thinking is if we find something useful, odds are other people will too. Well, this was very much the inspiration behind our newest product, QuickMeets, the all-in-one Meeting Management system that integrates with Act!.

As the business owner, I would typically have up to 15 Word documents open at any given time covering the agendas of different recurring meetings I had each week. Whether these were staff, sales, dev, or support meetings, I needed an agenda prepared for each. What's more, I typically needed the previous week's meeting open too so I could copy the content over to the new week's agenda. It was a mess, and all these assorted Word documents didn't lend to an effective archive system either, as they would get saved in meeting folders, and named based on the subject and date.

Not a great system of organization for a business, and worse still for a database person.

So last fall I sat down with the developer who built our popular QuickTasks, and asked him to build a similar product for managing meeting agendas and minutes. This product had to do the following:

• store all the meeting agendas in one place, and organized them with SQL Lite.
• organize the meetings into different cabinets based on the subject matter or committee.
• be able to create a meeting in QuickMeets, add users & contacts to it, and then send that meeting to Act! in a single click (through SDK or the API), or send Outlook invites just as fast
• allowing me to compartmentalize the minutes into different sections and assign each section an owner/presenter.
• be able to download all the users from Act!  so I can easily add to the meeting, assigned tasks, and be sent the minutes afterward
• to create new meetings by cloning past ones.
• be able to download any contact from Act! for external meetings, and again, distribute the minutes instantly afterward.
• be able to quickly export these minutes as an Excel, Word, or PDF file.
• be able to sync meeting notes through our Linktivity server, as we do with QuickTasks, so I can prepare notes from anywhere (this would be especially useful for preparing meeting notes at home, and then coming into the office to find them waiting for me at my work computer
• And last, be able to assign follow-ups to the participants.

The foundation of the product was built with QuickTasks, but the more we got into it, the more we realized this product was serving a very different purpose. Early drafts of QuickMeets were deployed internally in October and used extensively over the following months to determine what needed to be changed, fixed, or added. Now that we're in the second week of the year, we're super pleased with the outcome, and have decided to share this product with the Act! community. 

We're certain that Act! users who manage internal and/or external business meetings will find this product useful and develop better organizational skills with it. Meeting participants will get the minutes faster, you’ll be more accountable to your team, and be able to easily communicate any deliverables to the others. If you've ever struggled with Word documents to manage, you'll love what QuickMeets can do for your business. It's made a huge difference in ours.

• Download Link (2-week free trial)
• User manual

* QuickMeets is priced at $99.95 USD per activation and is scheduled for release on January 11th, 2023.

QuickMeets Console	Meeting Details