Board portals are radically changing the way traditional meetings are conducted. They enable the meeting to be more productive, facilitating workflows and save you time and energy that comes from performing redundant and unnecessary processes. Since a lot of companies nowadays are adopting this new technology, let’s take a look at what board portal software is the benefits that it could bring you.
Board Portals for Board of Directors Meetings
Board portals are secure areas where board members can hold meetings and store documents. They are especially useful for companies whose board members are dispersed over a wide geographic area. A board portal can eliminate the wasted time and expenses that come with having to physically travel to a location in order to participate in a meeting. Even though all of the participants might be located in different parts of the globe, the data room will make it feel like you are all in the same room working together.
The board portal can also be used as a central document repository. This is better than using a cloud service provider such as Google Drive or Dropbox since they do not have the necessary security features and can be easily hacked. Not only will the board portal give you peace of mind knowing that all of your documents are secure, but it will eliminate some of the time-wasters that come with searching for documents, requesting access and having to wait some more for the document owner to grant you access. Even though the board portal will eliminate one or two unnecessary clicks or processes, all of these extra things add up over the course of the day and end up taking up a good chunk of your time.
If you use a board portal, you will no longer have to worry about external and internal security threats. The board portal will adhere to international certification standards such as ISO/IEC 27001:2013, SOC2, HIPPA and the EU-US Privacy Shield Framework. The board portal will protect your documents with 256-bit encryption and two-factor authentication. All of these security measures make the board virtually impregnable from the outside.
In terms of internal security threats, the board portal has you covered as well. All of the documents inside the board portal will be protected by dynamic watermarks which will contain information such as the name of the user who accessed the information, the date of access and the IP address. Furthermore, all actions by each user are recorded and stored inside the board portal. You will be able to see which documents each user accessed and for how long, what they searched for and any other actions they performed. This helps eliminate unauthorized document sharing since all participants will know that any action can be traced back to them.
What Features Different Board Software Provide
One of the biggest features of board portal software is granular access permissions. This effectively puts you in the driver’s seat as far as document management is concerned. You will be able to grant or revoke document access rights on an individual basis, shred documents remotely, restrict access from a certain IP address and many other features. Some data room providers allow you to achieve a very fine level of granularity with secure spreadsheet viewing. Let’s say that you would like to upload a spreadsheet into the data room, but you do not want certain participants to see the formulas that were used during the calculation. This innovative feature will allow you to restrict information located within the spreadsheet itself.
Complex deals such as M&A transactions require a lot of communication and collaboration. All of this can be done securely inside the board portal. If you have a question, you will be able to ask it inside the board portal, you can set question statuses, assign questions to certain participants and even hold real-time discussions. This is much better and safer than using email or instant messaging services for communication since they are not secure and communication can be leaked without you even knowing it. Also, it is better to have your communication and documents all in the same place from an organizational point of view. If all of the documents are located inside the board portal, all participants will have access to the information that is necessary for the upcoming meeting and can be better prepared.
We mentioned security in the very beginning and the peace of mind that a board portal can bring. However, if you are very worried about certain documents falling into the wrong hands, you can take additional measures with secure “Fence View”. This is an innovative feature that serves as a physical barrier between the user and the document in order to defend against camera-based attacks. In the age of corporate espionage, if someone really wants to get their hands on a certain piece of information, they will be willing to go to great lengths to do so and simply taking out a cell phone and taking a picture of the computer screen is simply not a problem.
Given all of the advantages that board portal software offers, it is easy to see why so many companies are starting to adopt this technology. Keep in mind, the board portal can be of use to you even after the meetings are over as a central document repository. Should the need arise, all of the contents of the board portal can be downloaded to a DVD or flash drive. Try using a board portal for your next meeting and you will be amazed at the level of productivity that it brings. It will take care of a lot of the organizational and administrative processes that take up a lot of time and allow you to focus on your core business functions.