We sort of can’t believe it but we’re almost there! It finally feels like we’re reaping the benefits of all the hard work we’ve put in. We’ve kicked off our closed beta phase with feedback coming in thick and fast, and tweaks and changes a daily occurrence. For us this is a really rewarding stage of the project as we’re no longer toiling away at the foundations but adding on cool stuff that really makes a difference to the user experience.
Taking notes with Rendezview
But we’re jumping ahead of ourselves - seeing as this is our first blog entry, we’ll kick off by telling you what we’ve been working on.
Rendezview started off being all about making it easier for people to capture meeting notes and find them later. Born out of personal frustrations with dog-eared notebooks, word documents, e-mail threads, and a seeming inability to maintain our own notes effectively; we set off on what we didn’t think was such a mammoth task at the time: “Let’s just do a web app for quickly typing in notes and searching them later!” - oh how wrong we were!
Sure the typing-in-notes bit wasn’t too bad - but we realised quite quickly that attaining our main goal of having fewer, more effective meetings (plus everything that surrounds that) was a whole different kettle of fish. The domain surrounding meetings is after all - when you add it all up - really complex but we diligently set about, step by step, bringing in and providing what we hope are most pieces of the puzzle.
So to make it a bit less cryptic, will Rendezview let people plan meetings, collaborate on agendas (in order to improve planning and foster agreement on purpose and necessity), support task management (e.g. assigning tasks directly from a meeting) and so and and so forth. Then obviously at the heart of this are the minutes or meeting notes themselves. We elected to make them a granular, and meaningful, stream of entries you can whack in really quickly (a bit like an instant messenger) rather than a single document of multiple concerns that gets emailed around, updated etc. Finally the whole thing centres on having really good search at the forefront to make it easier to act on and find the stuff we spend all this effort creating. We’re hoping to expand our beta program soon, so if this strikes a chord with you, then please stay tuned.
