Menturio/WEB 1.7 released

This release (a.k.a. “Team Player”) introduces meeting management.

About meeting management in general
Meetings are key tools to keep a project on track. However, many times meetings are inefficient. They take long hours while discussions are never properly recorded, resulting in the same problems arising again and again. They tend to take completely new directions during the course of a discussion, leaving several problems uncovered. And, most importantly, even if they are recorded, participants do not receive an overview of what happened during the meeting; most of the time they leave with their own notes in their hands, hoping they recorded everything properly.

Meetings in Menturio™
Menturio™ addresses all these problems and more.
- meetings are entirely browser-based and SHARED. This means that participants need not be in the same room, building, or even country. They follow the course of the meeting on the meeting page that is being constantly updated. During meetings they can communicate using a browser-based instant messaging system, built into the meeting page.
- during meetings all the discussed problems are issues stored in Menturio™. Should a new problem arise or should you have some new idea, you can easily add a new issue to the meeting - all modifications are automatically recorded. This solves the problem of meetings being inflexible.
- only the issues added to a given meeting are discussed. You can take the issues step-by-step - the currently discussed issue is even highlighted on the meeting page so even participants who join after the meeting has started will instantly know the topic of discussion. This solves the problem of a meeting taking a different course from the desired one.
- after finishing a meeting, a report is automatically created, containing all the discussed issues, modifications, decisions on issues (including possibilities to postpone an issue to another meeting). This solves the problem of meeting documentation.

Participant management with e-mail notification, complete with vCalendar
The meeting participant management makes it easy to invite, notify and manage participants. The e-mails you send about a given meeting contain an automatically generated vCalendar entry; this feature, combined with the use of vCalendar-compatible calendar applications is very useful. You can add to a meeting internal Menturio™ users and external users as well. This makes it easy to have meetings with third-party experts who may not be constantly needed for the project; in this case, instead of going through the process of creating a user for the participant you just add him or her as an external. You can also send e-mail notifications to participants with a press of a button. Notifications include all necessary information about meetings (including location, start time - considering the participant's time zone, planned length, topic). When a meeting starts, you can set who is present and who is not, and this information is also stored automatically, making attendance registers obsolete. Also, Menturio™ can automatically send an e-mail message to each participant whenever a meeting is cancelled, saving you this tedious task.

Dynamically refreshed meeting page
The running meeting page (the page that you see when you join a running meeting) is constantly being updated, making sure you always see the current meeting status. Also, the meeting page includes an internal instant messaging system. These conversations are saved for later reference.

Improved general performance
During the development of meeting management we have made radical changes to the core engine of the system as well, resulting in serious performance boost on the Items page and on the Reports page.