Share Meeting Docs With Your Team in 3 Steps

There are a variety of ways to quickly share meeting documents with your team. For example, you could take advantage of one of the following:

Another approach, if you have an Evernote and Postach.io account, is to follow a workflow similar to the one below. Again, you can always adapt it to your needs, budget and available equipment.

In my role as a school administrator, I often end up in meetings where people hand me thick packets of paper. My first act is to take those back to the office, give them to my secretary and ask her to scan them to PDF. That PDF then ends up in Evernote. As a premium Evernote user, the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files become searchable. This is a real benefit when trying to dig up content sent to me a year or so ago that has new relevance (e.g. personnel handbook).

My secretary was so efficient at scanning my documents, that I felt compelled to invest in a Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300i. There are other scanners and I would label this one as “middle of the road" in terms of cost (approximately $250). Consider the mobile USB-powered DoxieGo ($162) or Fujitsu ScanSnap ($250), or the WiFi-friendly Fujitsu ScanSnap Evernote Edition ($495). The Fujitsu ScanSnap is fabulous and I just it daily to digitize documents, essentially, going paperless…the papers go in the recycle bin.

One of the advantages of the Fujitsu, and other scanners of this type, is that they come with support to save content anywhere, whether it be to a folder on my computer or directly to Evernote as a JPG (picture/image format) or Adobe PDF file.

For example, I recently attended a local event. One of the many paper handouts available was the beautifully designed agenda. While most of the paper will end up in the trash, I wanted to keep a digital copy. So, I ran the document through the Fujitsu Scanner mentioned above and ended up with this document (notice how when you view this on the web, all you see is a tidy Download PDF link):

If you’re like me, you have several options for sharing documents with others. I like to find the workflow that is most efficient because once that path has been identified, I don’t have to spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Instead of clogging people’s inboxes with emailed attachments, I just auto post the digital file to Evernote and then share it for download as an Adobe PDF file.

Another way is to post these documents—provided they are not confidential—into a Postach.io blog notebook in Evernote. This would allow documents, along with any notes you might have, to be available to folks with the web address to your Postach.io blog.

Note that you can add a password to your Postach.io blog to limit viewability.

While there are many tools available, some may find it easier to use Evernote and Postach.io to quickly share meeting notes and documents with others. Give it a try!

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