UNITED STATES—Virtual boardrooms are a fairly new development that combines a conference platform, a virtual board for planning, and many other useful features. The virtual board software market is actively developing and regularly offering new products to users. How to navigate through the variety of platforms and choose what is ideal for your business?

​Questions to answer before buying the program

Different types of board management software are designed for different purposes and suitable for different types of organizations. Therefore, before you purchase the software, you need to answer a few questions for yourself. This will allow you to choose the platform that best suits the needs of your organization.

  1. How big is your organization? How many people are in it? How many employees are willing to participate in conferences on a regular basis? This determines the type of software and, not insignificantly, its cost: platforms designed for a large number of users are more expensive. Moreover, versions of the same platform designed for different numbers of users will cost differently. For example, the Jira system in the version for small companies (up to 10 people) is available for free, while the version for large teams (200 participants or more) will cost more than $100,000.
  2. Is your organization commercial or non-commercial? The feature set of the platform depends on that. Most virtual boards are designed for businesses, but there are specific platforms designed for the needs of non-profit communities, such as Boardable.
  3. What types of tasks do you prioritize? Task-scheduling, virtual conferencing, document sharing, real-time communication within the team? Or all at once? As already mentioned, different types of board portal software have a different set of features: for example, virtual conferencing is present in almost all such systems, but voting, polling or task     scheduling may not be. Think about the needs of your organization and choose a platform with the options you need; you should not buy “spare” functionality, because each additional option increases the cost of the software.

Once you have answered all these questions and thought about your organization’s needs, you can start selection of board management software. Today, the range of such products on the market is very large. So how to make the right choice?

​What you should pay attention to when buying a virtual boardroom

How to choose a quality and reliable paperless meeting solution? What are the criteria for choosing the software? There are a few things you should definitely pay attention to:

  • Any enterprise software must guarantee top-notch security. A truly high-quality platform must have two-factor authentication, data encryption, the ability to control access to documents and audit logs that can be used to track platform activity. All of these options increase board portal security and reliability many times over;
  • Simple and intuitive interface. In this type of product, the interface is very important, even critical: not all future users of online board meeting software will have sufficient technical literacy, and not in all situations you will have time to explain how the platform works. Therefore, it is very important that the virtual conferencing space has a fairly simple interface that can be understood without additional explanations;
  • Support for commonly used devices and operating systems. Many platforms of this type are very demanding for the environments and devices they run on. For example, some virtual conferencing software does not support Windows or Linux, and many do not work on smartphones and tablets. Analyze the prevalence of certain systems and devices among your employees and find a platform that works for everyone;
  • Availability of a free trial version. The free version is a great opportunity to try out the platform in practice, understand the pros and cons, assess the functionality, convenience and quality of support. You should never turn down an opportunity to test a program before investing in it.

With a clear understanding of your organization’s objectives and knowledge of how to choose a truly high-quality virtual board, you can easily find the most suitable product for your business.