Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am approaching a place of increasing calm because one stress factor has been taken away
from me – meetings.
Now meetings can be as stressful as ever due to the people involved in meetings but all
of that rigmarole around getting into the meeting, the logistics of the meeting, the
phone numbers, the access bridges, the timing, all of that has been taken care of now for
me by a new assistant that I have living on my smartphone.
It’d called Meeting Moguls.
It keeps me on track, reduces my stress and it can do the same for you.
So I want to introduce it to you today on DottoTech.
We have all experienced the panic that we’ve got a 10:00 AM conference call, we might be
on the road, we might be in the cab that we’re calling in from and oh my gosh, where’s
the access number?
What’s the conference bridge?
What’s the access code?
Where are we meeting in cyberspace?
Oh, the stress that that entails and how embarrassing is it to have a conference call and not to
be there because you missed it?
Well, that need never happen again because there’s an app called Meeting Mogul which
is designed to do one thing and to do one thing very well - to help you get into and
out of meetings and to manage that entire process.
What they’ve done is they’ve created a really strong linkage between the app itself,
between Meeting Mogul and your calendaring app, regardless of what calendaring app that
happens to be.
A bridge is formed between the two and it looks in all of your appointments, finds the
relevant information like phone numbers, conference bridges, locations and it pulls all of that
information into Meeting Mogul, making it accessible to you in one simple interface.
Let me show you how it works because as I say, it does one thing but it does it so well.
This is my Meeting Mogul account and when I open it up, we can see that it’s got an
agenda type of calendar interface just like we would find say in Google Calendar.
In fact, it is syncing to my Google Calendar and as I look through it, I see at 9:00 AM
I’ve got a marketing call.
Normally speaking, I would go into my calendar, I would find the phone number and I’d copy
the phone number down or type it into my phone.
I don’t have to do any of that any more.
What I do is I just tap on the meeting itself and up comes a pre-programmed dialer that
manages the connection to the conference call, even when it’s through a conference bridge
with an access code.
All of that is managed.
This little window here gives us more than just the dialing capability, to be able to
dial into the call although that’s certainly is there.
Just hitting that big phone in the middle will dial me in and put me through into the
call.
But sometimes, you’re running a few minutes late.
Sometimes, you just want to get to a better location.
You’re in a noisy environment and you want to get to a quiet place.
They manage those simple communications such as sending a quick email to the people included
in the call all through this little custom interface.
It allows you to send a text message or to send an email to the people to let them know
that you’re on your way.
This interface does more than that.
They also allow us to open up and to have an agenda that we can share beforehand.
It gets attached to our calendar and we can make notes in during the meeting as well.
So if you’re sitting down, say you were just in a coffee shop, you were on a conference
call and you’re making notes during the meeting, you can go through and make sure
that all of your different agenda points are touched on through the meeting and at the
end of the meeting, if you’ve edited these notes, you can take this agenda, turn it into
an email instantly and send it to your entire team to follow up with them and give them
all of their action items from the meeting.
So they’ve thought of a lot of the things that you wanted to look for in a meeting management
app and they’ve given it to us.
Basically, the Personal use version is free.
There is an Enterprise version which is their revenue model which I will talk about in a
moment.
I want to go back first though and I want to show you the tools so you can get an idea
of all of the different capabilities.
Let’s go into the Settings area.
Here you can go in and as you can see, you can actually set it up for an Enterprise calendar.
I mentioned that it works in Enterprise.
You can set it up Salesforce or for Netsuite.
It can be attached to pretty much all of the different Enterprise email and calendaring
solutions.
But we go into the Settings, there depending on which of our accounts we’ve synced it
with, we get to choose which calendars to sync it with.
So I’ve got it set up on my Google Calendar because I use Google Calendars but I’ve
chosen which of my calendars I want to have reflected within Meeting Mogul.
This is really nice.
If you’re on the road and running about, you can store your calling card numbers so
that if you have to make a long distance call and have to call in, you can use it.
They also allow you to manage VOIP calls if you’re in a Wi-Fi area, that sort of stuff.
So it allows you to reduce the number of minutes on your plan if that is an issue.
They’ve got as well instant feedback which I kind of like.
The creators of the software say if you need to a support problem, if you have a question,
we’re going to give you instant access right within the app.
So if you are working and you need to support, you need help, you want an offered suggestion,
the troubleshooting capabilities are built right in and look, it even preloads what your
operating system and what your devices that’s sending the information through them.
So they’ve really thought things through.
I’m fairly impressed with all of the different small, little points, touch points that the
folks at Meeting Mogul have put together for us.
When we go back into the interface itself—let me go back out and then go back into the agenda
and this is the main interface—we can see a few more of the kind of corporate side features
by allowing us to have something called Favorites, which allows us to store frequently used bridges.
So if we are say creating a meeting and we’ve got a corporate bridge and a corporate account,
we can have that stored here so you don’t have to look up that information each time.
You can just have it stored within Meeting Mogul and now you can share a meeting with
somebody and create an ad-hoc audio conference or telephone conference call automatically.
It works in both Android and iOS and I said at the beginning, it does one thing but it
does it exceptionally well.
It manages all of the different logistics around meetings and phone calls, reducing
stress and increasing productivity.
What more can you ask for in a simple app?
Meeting Mogul – it is well worth you taking some time to check out.
I hope you found today’s video to be useful.
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Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!