In my industry, we are usually the first to test and use new products that become available to businesses across the world. One such tool that has become essential to our business ever since we got it a few years ago is the GBC Quartet IdeaShare Q8500. It’s an electronic whiteboard, which means that everything you write on the board is available in a digital format on a PC, Mac, or PDA - via Intranet, Internet, or live. It can also be sent to your printer for a hardcopy.
Last week we needed to brainstorm on a major restructuring of our sales goals that would directly effect about 100 salespeople and their supervisors. Most of them were tuned in from Chicago, Miami, and a few offices in other parts of the country. I was at the corporate office with 30 salespeople and supervisors. I conducted the presentation based on a PowerPoint presentation with ten slides of short topics for parts of the process and their impact on each team.
Live at the meeting, I displayed the PowerPoint on our IdeaShare. I took notes, added questions as they were asked, and scratched out ideas that we collectively discarded, directly on the board. Employees in our other locations were watching me on video and the whiteboard in real-time on their Macs.
At the end of the meeting, we had all agreed on what needed to be done and how we could do it. Everyone saved the live notes without having to copy them down for themselves. That way we stayed engaged in the conversation rather than trying to keep up with writing or typing for later reference.
The initiative has gone off without a hitch. Everyone understands the overall goal and their part in making it happen thanks to our collaboration.
This is just one demonstration of what an IdeaShare Board is capable of. We use ours almost everyday for dynamic brainstorming and interactive discussions.
It has other useful features like controlling your computer onscreen with an electronic pen pointed at the board, playback mode so users can replay the note-taking as it happened, and compatibility with PDAs so that your audience can take the information away with them.
