Even in today’s economy, there are new small businesses starting up left and right. Once an idea is formed, a multitude of meetings have to occur to plan for success, such as making sure the business strategy is secure, identifying the sales and marketing plan and key messaging, and targeting the right prospects.

It’s a true fact that there are too many meetings in business. On the flip side, it is true that meetings do need to exist. The trick is making meetings as efficient and effective as possible.

When working with OnePlace as your online collaboration solution, discussions play an important role in eliminating the need for multiple meetings, and can impact the major decisions that make a business successful.

Discussions can be created around a specific topic in each OnePlace Workplace, such as “Strategy”, “Tactics”, “Marketing”, “New Hires” and “Product Improvements”. Once you create a new discussions, you can invite the necessary team members to join. Each discussion member will be notified whenever there is a new discussion message, so they can respond accordingly.

Discussions are automatically refreshed, so teams can collaborate within a discussion in real time. This feature can allow for “online meetings” to discuss business plans and eliminate the need to meet face to face on certain issues.

Discussion members can also upload files directly into the discussion. Rather than emailing a large file to team members, this discussion file sharing option allows all team members to download at their leisure. Now collaboration can happen around a specific file to make it even better.

Each post within the discussion can be promoted directly to a task or a project. Small business teams no longer need to take the extra step to add in a task based on notes from a discussion. By using this feature, supervisors can input questions or notes from a client, and development team members can take responsibility for their own tasks directly from the discussion itself.

And for those times that team meetings are necessary, the OnePlace discussion tools are great for meeting planning. Here, team members can outline the agenda, upload a new document or presentation for review, touch base on main discussion points, and cover small items that will only take time away from the meeting.

By using OnePlace discussions for your business planning tasks, you are setting the groundwork for your business to be efficient and successful. Plan on using the discussions from the start to make your business productive, and rise above the competition in record time.