Decisions is a handy app if you are looking to streamline meeting workflows and get better outcomes inside Microsoft Teams. Founded in 2016, the company has offices in Norway, India, and the US and is a certified Microsoft partner. The Decisions app comes natively integrated into the Teams interface. You could download it from the Microsoft marketplace or get a similar experience by purchasing the Decisions app directly.
Over the years, Decisions has won several awards and accolades, making it among the most popular apps in the Microsoft ecosystem. In 2017, it received the Microsoft Partner app award for the second-best office integration and moved first to place the year after. In 2019, it was named one of the top three best overall apps in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Decisions is rated 4 out of 5 in the marketplace, with 62% of customers giving it a stellar 5/5 review.
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Let us now review its features in more detail.
Inside the Decisions App
Decisions is purpose-built to make your Microsoft Teams meetings more productive. It lets you create a structured agenda, invite participants, record minutes, and convert talking points into post-meeting action items. As virtual meetings become a significant and permanent part of our work life, Decisions adds quite a lot of value to the overall Teams experience.
- Agenda builder – With Decisions, you can create highly detailed meeting agendas with critical topics, objectives, attachments, and assigned speakers. Agendas are also collaborative, so that different meeting participants can upload files and ask or answer questions.
- Minutes templates – There are two options for creating minutes – you could either merge the agenda into a word or One Note template with a single click. Or, you could create a custom template that will be populated with the essential talking points discussed during the meeting.
- Time and progress tracker – This handy feature keeps meetings from getting derailed and keeps participants in a group meeting informed about the expected conversation flow. Each talking point will be assigned a specific duration based on your agenda, and you can track progress using the side panel.
- Meeting book generation – The meeting book is nothing but a shareable encapsulation of the agenda, including all the attached files for perusal by the meeting participants. Decisions allows you to automatically generate a PDF or PPT version of the meeting book.
- Secure in-app voting – Polls are now increasingly common during virtual collaboration sessions. Decisions features a Vote Now capability that you can run directly from Teams to conduct orderly polls. The results are recorded on the side panel and as part of the document.
- Auto-sync with Planner and To Do – As Decisions can be synchronized with the Planner app on Teams or with Microsoft To Do. its innovative text capability can recognize tasks and decisions arrived at during the meeting and send participants email notifications regarding the same.
- In-meeting side panel – This feature displays meeting progress and agenda items assigned to the meeting participants in real-time, with your video display.
- Secure sign-in – Decisions is compliant with all security protocols followed by Teams and Microsoft 365. It doesn’t store any customer data itself, and you can integrate Decisions with SSO and Azure MFA.
- Speak Now – Speak Now refers to a speaker list feature that chronologically arranges meeting participants in the order they are expected to speak. With Speak Now, participants can request recess, interrupt a conversation, or request a rejoinder without disrupting the meeting flow.
Why the Decision App Makes a Difference
The biggest differentiator with Decisions is its ability to generate a Meeting Engagement Score™. As your meeting progresses from the agenda stage to execution and post-meeting actions, you can view a simple percentage score reflecting how effectively you could engage with your audience/participant group.
Download it here.
