Many people regularly experience the frustration of attending meetings that do not actually achieve any useful purpose. After such a meeting, attendees often complain about how their time could have been spent more productively, and there is a general feeling of dissatisfaction.

Well, the creators of the Meeting-Facilitator service claim that help is at hand. Their idea is that by providing a virtual administrator (a computer-generated animated character called Tara) to assist the meeting chairperson, meetings can become a lot more effective and profitable.

You simply take a laptop to a meeting, or have a desktop computer set up in the meeting room. Then connect to the internet and access the Meeting-Facilitator service. Your virtual meeting facilitator, Tara, can then act as a computerised participant in the physical meeting. To make it easier for everyone to see and hear Tara, it is recommended that a projector and external speakers are used.

Meeting-Facilitator is the product of a partnership between Creative Business Machines, a company specialising in business productivity, and DA Group, makers of character technology for digital platforms.

The emphasis is on simplicity and intuitiveness, and you are lead through the setup process in a series of easy steps, enabling you to create an account and to be ready to start a meeting quickly.

Before actually starting a meeting, a sequence of screens organises you to make sure that you have laid the necessary groundwork. You are invited to create an agenda, specify length of time for agenda items, schedule breaks, list the attendees, and choose some optional components that help to enhance the meeting experience.

You can set up all of the meeting details in advance and store them in your account. When the meeting is about to start, you access the relevant details and Tara is up and running with all the necessary information.

When the meeting details are saved, email invitations are automatically sent to people who are entered as attendees, including the person calling the meeting; allowing the appointment to be put into an appropriate diary.

If you cancel the meeting, an email is sent to all intended participants to let them know. This is a useful feature because there is nothing worse than travelling to a meeting, only to be told that it has been cancelled.

Once the meeting is started, a simple, uncluttered screen is displayed, from which Tara addresses the participants in a Scottish accent. Generally, her voice is understandable, but there were occasions when I was not quite sure what was being said.

Some users might prefer to choose a different character, perhaps with a different voice, but this facility was not in evidence.

The meeting controls are self-explanatory, so there is no real need for a help facility, which is not provided. If you are uncomfortable at the thought of being kept on track by a synthetic person, the controls allow you to pause or skip parts of Tara's performance, and you can end the meeting at any time. You also have the facility to alter the time allocated to agenda items if you need to.

Although the service is supposed to provide Tara as a digital administrator, a meeting participant will still have to be given the tasks of taking the minutes and recording actions. Areas are available on screen in which to enter those details.

With the gentle prompting of Tara, the meeting proceeds through the agenda and encouragement is given throughout to cover the meeting topics in a way that ensures some sort of positive outcome by adding actions using the Action Planner area.

At the end of the meeting, Tara prompts the attendees to review the minutes and the agreed actions. They can then be printed off, emailed to the attendees, or both.

There are some design flaws; the volume control has no level indicator and the meeting duration clock only displays minutes and seconds, so it goes back to zero after an hour. Also, the Action Planner does not allow mistakes to be corrected easily if actions are entered erroneously.

Lastly, I experienced an intermittent problem where the video footage for displaying Tara could not be obtained and an error message popped up on screen.

The service can be used on a PC or Mac, with a minimum 512k internet connection, and a web browser with the Macromedia Flash Player installed.

A free demonstration is available, but at the time of writing, an email had to be sent to request it. The facility to get a demonstration account from within the website was not yet operational.

Meeting-Facilitator takes a novel approach to solving the problem of wasteful meetings. If you are a competent meeting planner and host, or you already have a capable meeting organiser at your disposal, you will have no need of Meeting-Facilitator and the helpful Tara.

However, the service might be worth considering if you find it impossible to hold productive meetings, and no amount of meeting management training seems to make any difference.

If a few more features were added, it would be possible for Tara to help out with online meetings as well. Who knows, maybe that's one of the future directions for this service.

Update - January 20th 2005

As a consequence of our review, two changes have been made to the user interface that will help to improve its usability.

The first is a volume level indicator that has been added to the control panel.

The second is the addition of hours to the meeting clock.

The speed with which Meeting-Facilitator has been updated is a testament to the ability of agile companies to respond to customer requests.

More info: http://www.meeting-facilitator.com

Pricing:
1 meeting USD 20
10 meetings USD 93.5
50 meetings USD 375
100 meetings USD 560

Free trial: send email to info[at]meeting-facilitator.com

System requirements: http://tinyurl.com/6xmab