Plan Agendas, Take Notes, and Share with Online Meeting Organizer
The number one complaint people in my office have with meetings is that they're disorganized. Attendees often don't know the agenda ahead of time, meetings are random and confusing, and action items aren't properly communicated when it's over. Sound like meetings you attend? If so, I have the antidote in the form of an app so easy to use you'll want to apply it to all of your meetings.
Ketchup is an online meeting planner that is elegant in its simplicity, but pretty thorough in design. As long as you have a Web connection, you can go to Ketchup, create a meeting, and add agenda items. You can keep it private or send the URL to your attendees at any time. Either way, only you can make changes to the page.
You can also enter notes for each agenda item, which is a handy way to summarize the meeting and assign action items.
Not only is Ketchup a great real-time tool for managing a meeting, the site archives your past meetings, so you (or anyone else) can refer back to past events and check on what happened and who agreed to do what.
The interface is simple and -- dare I say it -- almost fun to use, so there's no excuse not to try it out. It's also free, though you do need to sign up to start using it. (Co-workers don't need to sign up to access the public URLs for your meeting agendas and notes.) One sour note for Ketchup, though: the site blocks Internet Explorer completely because it's not tested with the service, so you'll have to use Firefox or Safari. Not a problem for everyone, but certainly a show stopper for people who are required to use Internet Explorer in the office.