Aster is a French startup that offers productivity solutions for Microsoft 365 users. The company was founded in 2014 and recently came out with its flagship platform to help you optimise meeting outcomes on Microsoft Teams. The platform is available both as a web app and a Teams integration. Using the web app, you can plan your meeting agenda, set recurring meetings, make a note of meeting outcomes, collaborate with meeting participants, and share notes via external channels – essentially, enrich all surrounding activities for a meeting to enable better outcomes.
Aster is used by leading organisations like Microsoft, Saint Gobain, Michelin, Société Générale, and several others in the EU region.
Aster is fully integrated with the Microsoft 365 environment. You can synchronise agenda tasks with Planner. You can create Aster-powered meetings from Microsoft Outlook. You can send automated reminders through Teams notifications. You can even use Aster in real-time, during a meeting, through its Microsoft Teams meeting extension. Finally, you may share the meeting report on SharePoint. Apart from this, Aster connects with other software tools in your workflow to improve productivity – such as Trello, Google Chrome, and G Suite.
The Aster Teams app is available with the paid version of the platform and was launched in Q4 of 2020. The Aster Teams app makes nearly all its features available from the Microsoft Teams platform, and you can work on an agenda asynchronously before you get together to meet in real time. Let us review the app in further detail.
Inside Aster for Teams
The Aster integration for Microsoft Teams is available only with the Pro and Enterprise editions of the platform. If you aren’t already a customer, you can sign up for an Aster Pro license at $349 per month for up to 10 organisers and unlimited guests. Once your account is running, you may visit Microsoft AppSource to download the Teams integration. Or, you can install Aster for Teams from the application store in your Teams window. Here are the key features it enables.
- Access agenda items added from any platform – Aster synchronises all the information created and added via its integrated communication platforms, including the Google suite of applications and Trello. When you open your Aster account from Teams, you will also be able to access agenda items added from other platforms.
- Collaborative agenda planning – When you add Aster as an extension to a meeting, you can view and collaborate on the meeting agenda. Meeting participants can add new agenda items, mark existing items as done, add comments, etc.
- The Aster in-meeting experience – This is the primary capability enabled by the Aster Teams app. It fetches your agenda information in a panel alongside the ongoing video or audio call. Meeting participants have a ready reference for all the agenda items under discussion; they can mark specific elements as completed or even create new things that will be turned into follow-up information.
- Automated meeting summary sharing – Once a meeting is over, Aster collates and consolidates a list of everything discussed and decided, using both the meeting agenda and in-meeting notes. The summary is automatically shared with all meeting participants so everyone is on the same page.
- Automated reminders on Teams – The Aster Teams integration ensures that no meeting participant misses out on a discussion because of a crowded schedule. For recurring meetings and one-off discussions, Aster will send an automated reminder for the Teams user to join in. It also reminds the user about their expected role in the upcoming meeting.
- Integration with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem – The full potential of Aster’s Teams app can be felt only when you connect the app with other Microsoft and Office 365 tools like Planner, Outlook, OneNote, etc., for example, your meeting notes in Teams can be synchronised with Planner tasks or saved as a OneNote report.
Why the Aster App Makes a Difference
Aster provides assistance before, during, and after a meeting, ensuring no agenda item is left out. It helps make meeting outcomes truly actionable and improves productivity.
What We Think
Teams users can save up to 7 hours per month (that’s almost an entire workday) through Aster-powered meetings. It integrates with the full ecosystem of Microsoft 365 apps, and the meeting extension dramatically enriches real-time collaboration.
Download the Aster app for Teams here.
