The support site includes the following capabilities:

Troubleshooter: This takes you on a step-by-step problem resolution process, and is the fastest way to resolve a problem including a full text search interface.

Knowledge Base: A rich repository of “how-to” examples, perfect for new clients. Examples include “How do I create an approval?”, “How do I lock a user”

Download Center: Includes in-depth training and user guides for Directors, Administrators, and of course, the iPad.

Automated Ticket Submission: If you want to raise a support question, using this interface provides for automatic reporting and notification as the case is progressed and resolved.

To gain access, we do need to set up an access login for you, so please drop me a line, and I will set one up for you. Again I want to stress this content is in addition to our fabled 7×24 direct support, so feel free to call at any time.

This was a great show for BoardVantage with a record amount of booth traffic. It was nice to see so many old friends stop by and say “hello” to us, but it was obvious that most people were really at our booth to see the real star – our iPad app.

Not surprisingly then, the highlight was a breakout session on the adoption of technology in the boardroom — portals, iPads and teleconferencing. The session was attended by nearly 300 — standing room only! And the 3 panelists (Gale Chang of Met Life , Angela Hilt of Clorox, and Carol Schwartz of American Express) were coincidentally all BoardVantage users, a reflection of the market uptake in our iPad app. The panel covered a number of topics including:

• The importance of due diligence around ease-of-use and security when selecting a board portal
• 10 Tips for successful implementation of a board portal and how to achieve ‘paperless’
• Conferencing with boards
• How to effectively facilitate iPad adoption

The interest level remained high throughout the conference with all the attendees having in-depth discussions on board portals and iPads. It seems the main question now being “when”, rather than “if” you will move your Directors to iPads.

iPad Briefcase now remedies this dilemma – allowing secure iPad access to meeting books even while on the go. Let’s look at what that means:

• Automatic syncing to latest version
• Remote content purging
• Retention policy enforcement
• Hassle-free note taking for meeting prep
• iPad optimized format and graphics

Check out our solutions page for more details.

Please feel free to contact me directly for more details. And please continue sharing all the great ideas!

• For Directors – Customize the look and feel of the portal with the colors and layout of your directors’ choice. Also the addition of modern social media (with full security) opens up the opportunity for greater board collaboration between meetings.
• For Administrators – Bridge the gap between the web and the desktop.  Drag-and-drop, visual permissions, multi-line operations, and a 2-way syncing calendar, all the features you depend on in your desktop environment are now available in NextGen.
• For Directors – iPad app, downloadable from iTunes.  Combine the rich animation of the iPad with the platform architecture of NextGen.  Put every aspect of every meeting at your directors’ fingertips with a bird’s eye view of all meetings, prior, current and future and a drill-down view of all content with board books, attendees and arrangements.

Check out our solutions page for more details.

If you think this is right for your board, what does the upgrade process look like? It’s a three-step process:

1. Get Started with a Demo. This will cover the new functionality and can be used as a basis for discussing what functionality you would like to phase in first.
2. We Provision a Test Instance. This will let you use your content to get a feel for the new system. Most customers use the test instance for 1 or 2 weeks.
3. We Assist with the Director rollout. Since NextGen is highly intuitive director training is quicker that anything you have had in the past. Many customers skip formal training entirely. In any case we’re more than happy to assist in the way that works best for you.

Please feel free to contact me directly for more details.

The corporate secretary office can use it to present board meeting information in an intuitive format, for example by highlighting new items. One layout that works well is to present the upcoming board book agenda front and center, with separate panels for a meeting calendar and links to minutes and committees. Adding your own corporate logo and colors creates a professional appearance that reassures your audience.

Executives can use it to package information for their own teams. In theory, staff ought to be able to find information using navigation and search. In practice, though, day-to-day pressures will crowd out anything that isn’t front and center. With a branded page I can put in one place, everything that I think is important. You can think of this as Intranet 2.0 – the crucial difference being that my assistant can update the content and I’m no longer dependent on support outside of my team.

Here’s an example that our VP Marketing, Tim Hampson, put up. The primary audience is Sales, and it’s purpose is to give everybody a heads up on what is coming as well as one-stop shop for materials that Tim thinks Sales should be using. Since Tim controls this directly, it’s always up to date. I love it, as I now know my sales teams have the best and most timely marketing content available at their fingertips.

We’ve been experimenting with tablets for years in an attempt to lower the technology barrier for directors, but nothing seem to be able to move the standard laptop as the tool of choice. Frankly speaking, up to the introduction of the iPad, tablet computers have been little more than a PC minus the keyboard. They all suffered from the same shortcomings that most executives have grudgingly learned to work around, but that many directors just won’t accept.

After Joe published his early experiences with the iPad for BoardVantage, we’ve been inundated with inquiries. Directors across our customer base, whether at Washington Management, TriMas or Validus were running BoardVantage on their iPads within days from the Apple announcement. In many cases, companies let me know that the buzz in their boardroom was so great that they’re buying iPads for all their board members.

It’s a fair question to ask why the iPad is such a hit with directors. As best as I can tell its success is based as much on what it does NOT do, as what it does. While the iPad lacks the countless features that power users in the corporate secretary office demand, that is no loss for directors. What they value is that it’s always-on, highly readable, super-slim and lightweight. Apple’s philosophy of “less is more” is a perfect fit for directors, because the smart design trade-offs make for a hassle-free experience.

You can use BoardVantage with the iPad today, and of course we’re always happy to demo this, especially to organizations with traditional boards who have in the past been reluctant to move online. The iPad has done more to shake up the board portal market than anything I can remember.

There are of course a number of RFP template software tools, but these all focus on the content at the expense of the actual approvals process. Secondly, in taking as their unit of granularity the RFP question, they paint a fantasy world where responding to an RFP is as simple as selecting from a database of pre-approved questions. If only… The reality is every RFP has a substantial custom element – if all the client needed were stock responses, they would not have gone to the trouble of creating an RFP and instead simply reviewed your stock marketing material. Further, I’ve never seen the same substantial question phrased the same way. Always there is some subtle unique twist, typically requiring not just a rewrite, but also a further approval cycle.

It’s far to say I used to dread RFP’s. Upon receiving the RFP, it would enter a black hole, ideally remerging when complete, but with little or no visibility of progress to me. Account managers would literally have to walk backwards and forwards between legal and engineering to get approval on a form of words. The final product would be sent to me for approval with a helpful cover note like “this has to go out in the next 2 hours”. Thanks team.

We’ve now implemented a formal process with the BoardVantage Portal. Through real-time chat and conferencing, product management, sales, legal, and engineering can all agree on the language. Automatic versioning means the latest version is always at hand with no danger of the wrong version being used. The whole process from start to finish is more efficient and this is crucial as it gives my team back time on deadline. I can’t stress how important that is. The typical reaction on finishing an RFP used to be “if only we had more time, we could have added…”. Now, RFP’s are finished days ahead of the deadline – time for a proper review. Time to sleep on it. Time it make sure you really have put your best foot forward.

As an executive I also win with real-time status updates on the RFP which mean I don’t have to just hope it will be finished on time, but can intervene if I sense issues or sticking points developing( management through visibility). By putting an automated process in place, I can be confident of higher quality, and better RFP’s mean more sales. Sales force automation tools are great and the bread and butter for Sales’ data-centric processes. With the BoardVantage Portal, I have that same capability of process discipline with people-centric processes.

1. 25 referred to the same contract negotiation. I’d been copied on every single minor detail, as my sales person thought this is more likely to get legal to agree (it isn’t).

2. 14 were asking me to approve the account manager getting hold of a copy of the original contract from Legal for the annual renewal.

3. 15 were asking me who could answer this question or another. Basically using me as a switchboard operator to route their request.

4. 3 were from the VP engineering with product status details

5. 15 were spam or solicitations.

I think most execs have a similar problem. Email overload, with no way to separate out on the basis of urgency or importance. “Managing chaos” seems as accurate a description of my job as any, but the BoardVantage Portal has transformed both my inbox and my overall efficiency.

Since we started using it internally, one of the first things I did was to take advantage of our gold-standard security to implement a company-wide contracts database, administered by Finance, but accessible by account managers to the specific contracts only they should have access too. The result? Those 14 emails asking me for access – gone.

Then we implemented our RFP and contracts process within the portal.  Since the BoardVantage Portal manages all of the versioning – I need never have to trawl through 100 odd email attachments to find the latest (why does everyone title every email as “Latest”?). With the BoardVantage Portal, the latest is always the one visible. Also, by moving the approvals process to BoardVantage, I can choose to prioritize the urgent and the important, and make sure that out of the 100 things I ought to do today, the 50 that I really, absolutely, positively, must do today, get done. Another 25 emails vaporized.

One of my favorite aspects of BoardVantage Portal is the rich personal profiles. This means that my reports can go directly to the source (“discover expertise” is the phrase used) and get me out of my role as “switchboard operator in chief”. Of course, a lot of these requests are not so much about not knowing who to contact, as seeking my approval to contact. That is really a cultural question – one in which I rely on the Wall to drive team behavior .

Perhaps the biggest single benefit of the BoardVantage Portal lies in the fact that the combination of functionality drastically improves overall visibility. It lets me control the chaos by moving activities off email and implementing process discipline , a topic about which I will write more…

I’ve found a new tool within the BoardVantage Portal to be a godsend. The Wall is our sales portal landing page, and directly editable by me to include whatever’s on my mind. The beauty of it is that it’s “always on”. I can control not just the content, but crucially I also control the order in which content appears and make sure that my top-of-mind, is their top-of-screen. Because I can control the branding and presentation, I can again emphasize important points as well as reinforcing that “quality begins at home”.

The Wall is basically my opportunity to give a pep talk to all my reports every morning, no matter where they may be. It gets everyone on the same page.