Creating a binder

The binder is the core of Athena Board and represents a collection of items for delivery for a board or committee meeting.

Binders are extremely flexible and can be easily tailored for many uses and format requirements.

Creating a binder is easy and the agenda builder wizard controls the flow. Select new from the Binders menu item in the admin portal and the wizard will start.

Note that the expiry date is optional. If a date is entered the binder will be removed from each attendee and recipient’s device on that date. It will remain in the admin portal. You will leave this blank most of the time.

Next you select the attendees and recipients that will receive the binder. The only difference is that attendees attend the meeting and this is reflected in any minutes that are created for the meeting.

To add attendees/recipients to a binder, simply click on the name or drag from the left to the right column. Each will be added as an attendee, you can change to/from a recipient by click on the appropriate button.

Document Types

Athena Board supports multiple item types for delivery a part of a binder:

Document

A document is a single item for delivery to the user. This type supports all the features of the user applications (annotations etc)

Multi-Doc

Multi-doc is a variant of the document type where the source materials come in the form of multiple uploaded documents. They are stored in the admin portal separately and can be updated, reordered and deleted as required. Once published they are delivered as a single concatenated document to the users.

Header

A header is a separator. Headers can be a stand-alone item (to separate sections in a meeting) or may have sub items. If the header has sub-items, the heard is displayed as ‘compress’ in the users apps and must me opened. If a particular user does not have access to the header, they will not be able to open it in the app, this provides a mechanism of ‘hiding’ content from some users.

Minutes

Minutes are standard document but given the type of minutes by the administrator to clearly delineate them as such. Minutes generated by our minutes tool are automatically set as minutes when added to a binder.

Resolutions

Resolutions can be any document but when uploaded to the admin portal and set as resolution they will inherit a new behaviour when displayed to the users in the apps. When selected by a user all the normal document features are removed and only a signing option remains.

Once the document is signed it becomes immutable and is uploaded to the admin portal for action by the administrator.

Video

Videos (Mp4 or Mov format only) files may be upload for delivery to board users to play.

Vote

Votes are a title and question with a set of answers the user may choose from. The answer list is free form and selected by the administrator at vote creation time.

Once the vote has been actioned by a user the result is available to the administrator.

Structuring a binder

Items and be drag and dropped from your desktop in the usual fashion directly onto the drop target in the agenda builder or selected individually. Multiple files can be dragged and dropped in one operation. If a folder of files is dropped, a Header is automatically created with the name of the folder and the files added as sub-items of the header.

Athena Board will use the name of the file as the name that is displayed to the users in the apps, you can edit this at any time – per or post publishing.

If the name of the file contains ‘resolution’ or ‘minutes’ the item will be typed as a resolution of minutes, if this is not correct you are able to change this.

Binder items can be reorganised easily by dragging to a new position. If an item is dragged on top of another item it will be made a sub-item of that item. Up to five levels of sub-items are permitted.

Contributed Document

Contributed documents may be added to binders it the same way as other documents. The only change is that they are selected from the contributor inbox.

Microsoft Office document conversion

Ansarada Board supports conversion of Microsoft Office format documents (.docx, .pptx and .xlsx) to our internal format of PDF. Once converted the uploaded office document is securely discarded, we do not retain a copy of the office document.

Currently Athena Board does not support Word document with track changes enabled. The admin portal will advise the administrator as such when attempting an upload of this type. The recommended solution is to use the ‘Print to PDF’ option in Word, NOT save as PDF.

See the how to publish a binder how to article for information on binder publishing and options.