Diligent Boards review by Inspector Jones

Diligent Boards claims to have started the entire Board Portal niche. It says it is both the oldest Board Portal product, and also the best selling one.

AIG Sun America came to Diligent in 2000 asking if they could develop a system to securely automate the process of creating and distributing materials necessary for their board meetings to operate. This led to the creation of Boardbooks, which became available for public release in 2007.

Boardbooks’ customer base has now grown to 2500 organisations, with 87,000 users.

Diligent Boardbooks has one key point of difference over its opposition. Its interface has the look and function of a book. All board documents for a particular board meeting appear as separate pages in a book to the directors as they read them - not as separate document files.

Directors can choose to read their documents on iPads or Windows 8.1 (including Windows surface) tablets, and it feels very similar to reading a book in iBooks (or a Windows alternative). There is one glaring omission here, however, as there is no Android app available.

Over time there have been enhancements to the product to ensure that it is user-friendly, both to company directors and to administrative staff who prepare the documentation.

The company directors can access any board materials directly from their tablet or computer. They can easily download the relevant “book” for the current or a past board meeting, reading either online, or downloading to their device.

The documents are fully collaborative. A board member can type any notes he or she sees fit, and can then choose to share them with any other board member, assuming they have correct security clearances.

They can even review and decide on consent resolutions, voting modules and questionnaires.

One huge advantage of receiving board documents electronically (which can be hundreds of pages of documents for some company board meetings) is that you can easily search through the “book”, doing key word searches.

As Diligent Boardbooks has matured it has tried to make life easier for company administrators. They can create board materials using drag and drop methods to simply transfer documents from a computer desktop to finished book pages. They can easily collate all of the documents for a meeting, with a single click.

If there are different security clearances for different board members, administrators can easily determine which document pages can be visible to which directors.

Security is a major focus for Diligent Boardbooks, as a their marketing emphasizes that their clients can meet all legal requirements using their system. Diligent owns its own data hosting infrastructure and it provides daily backups (with some further intra-day backups). Data is simultaneously backed up in different locations).

It uses high level data encryption, 256 bit when data is at rest, 128 bit when data is in transit.

Unlimited 1 on 1 training, installation and set-up, IT support, and remote diagnostics are all part of Diligent’s standard service agreement.

If you are a corporate, who still delivers its board meeting documentation using physical, printed hard copies, you might consider checking out whether Diligent Boardbooks offers what you are looking for to streamline your processes.