Board Pack Review Process
Overview
BoardCloud’s review process lets conveners or editors send a draft meeting pack or minutes to selected members for review. Note that this process does not work for published packs.
Reviewers can make comments, which can be collectively viewed by the review requestor. Depending on settings, reviewers can also collectively view all comments.
Note that when published, the pack will contain no review comments. These are removed during publishing. However, a history of review comments is preserved and can be accessed via the Publish History option in Meeting Control (view Draft Packs).
Reviewers are selected via the Meeting Control (Cogs) menu item Send for Review.
See image below:
Review Notifications
Selected members will receive an email requesting them to review the meeting pack. Emails sent have a subject line starting with: For Review.
Reviews are conducted on a draft version of the pack, with no access to the full meeting Agenda. This will only occur when the meeting is published.
Review emails contain detailed instructions that include:
- The name of the review requestor
- The email address of the review requestor
- Link to a video tutorial explaining the viewer functions
- Most importantly, a link to the viewer to review the pack.
Admin Function Related to Reviews
Once a draft pack has been sent for review, a Review Status icon will appear in the center of the Details pane in the Meeting Overview section. Below, highlighted in yellow, is the Review Status icon.
The review status shows a list of members who have been sent review notifications.
From the above images, it can be seen that Fran has reviewed the pack in January. Trilby, the second reviewer, has not yet started his review.
Member Functions Relating to Reviews
Selected reviewers can only access the pack using the review link in the email they receive. Members have to be logged in to BoardCloud in order to access the review document.
Members can annotate the review document as desired. Note that comments are saved automatically and the browser used to view the document can be opened and closed as required. This means the reviewers can review documents over multiple sessions.
Reviewing the Reviews
When more than one reviewer is part of the review process, a question may be raised. The question is: should reviewers share their comments?
Your organization may decide either way, because BoardCloud has a setting that can accommodate either option:
When checked, the "Allow for shared board pack comments" allows all reviewers to view each other’s comments. The opposite applies when this option is unchecked and reviewer comments are private - they can only be seen as a group by the review requestor.
Viewer: Comments Pane
The BoardCloud Pack Viewer has a Comment (or Review) pane that provides a page-by-page listing of all review comments entered by the reviewers and the review requestor. Navigate between comments by clicking on them.
Review Status
At present, there are two review status values: New and Closed.
All reviews are New when created.
Reviews are automatically closed when the meeting pack is published.
Once a review is closed, a reviewer will be blocked when attempting to open the review.
A message similar to the below will be shown.