One of the most dynamic sectors of Web applications over 2010 has been services that help get people together for meetings. You can divide these into two main groups: Event scheduling and meeting or conference support. Some of the services in both group are narrowly focused while others cross over both groups providing both the scheduling and the meeting infrastructure.
In the purely scheduling side there’s Doodle and YouCanBookMe while join.me is very focused on the actual meeting and GoToMeeting covers both categories.
Agreedo, a fairly new free and completely Web-based service that’s on the infrastructure side, is one that I really like because it adds a new and valuable dimension to meetings: Coordinating the agenda for multiple participants and the production of minutes during the meeting that can be seen and agreed to by everyone.
You can reference notes and minutes from previous meetings within the Agreedo service and the system supports exporting so that you can archive meeting details and incorporate the data in other tools and reports. More importantly, Agreedo allows you to create lists of decisions, followup tasks and action items.
In the Agreedo dashboard you can see all the meetings you have scheduled, browse the details of this that have been completed, and create new meetings. Meetings can be public or private and you can make them moderated. The system will send out invitations to participants (who can join in even if they don’t have an Agreedo account) which includes Outlook and Notes compatible calendar updates..
What I’d like to see Agreedo add is an API for setting up meetings and downloading meeting data as well as the inclusion of an integrated free conferencing service.
Even so, as it stands today, Agreedo has value for even quite small meetings and for large groups, Agreedo can really reduce friction, misunderstanding, and prevent details from being lost.
