eBoard™

A board portal should be materially more secure than the alternative it replaces, which is usually confidential papers sitting in personal email accounts and on unmanaged laptops. The controls to insist on are role-based access enforced down to an individual document, the ability to withdraw a director's access to historical packs when they leave, an audit trail of who opened which paper and when, and secure in-system messaging so board discussion does not migrate back to email. eBoard provides all four. Hosting location, encryption posture and any residency requirement are confirmed during the design phase and written into the solution design, because the right answer differs for a listed company, a regulated bank and a state corporation.

eBoard is priced per organization, with users included, so the cost does not climb every time a director or committee secretary is added. Starter is USD 2,500 per year and includes 10 users, which suits a single board getting started. Professional is USD 7,500 per year and includes 30 users, with unlimited committees, AI-drafted minutes, e-signatures and audit reporting; it is the right fit for most boards. Extra users are USD 200 and USD 175 per user per year respectively. Enterprise is quoted for groups, regulators and public-sector bodies that need multi-entity boards, their own storage or a perpetual on-premises licence. Non-profits and academic institutions receive 30% off Starter and Professional. Implementation is scoped separately: configuring your committee structure, permission model and minute templates, and migrating historical packs if you want the searchable decision history from day one. Systems priced per meeting or per board pack tend to look cheapest at purchase and get expensive once committees start using them properly.

A document management system is built around the document: storage, versioning, retention and retrieval across the whole organization. A board portal is built around the meeting and the decision, agenda, pack, vote, minute, action, and treats documents as inputs to that cycle. Boards that try to run governance from a general document management system usually manage the papers adequately and lose the decision record, which is the part that matters when somebody asks why a decision was taken. Many organizations run both, with the board portal handling governance and the document management system handling the wider records estate.

Yes. Directors are the users least likely to be at a desk on a good connection, so offline reading is a practical requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Packs can be downloaded to a tablet and read in transit, with annotations retained. Access to downloaded material is governed by the same permissions as the online pack, which matters when a director's term ends.

Yes. Electronic voting and approval workflows cover round-robin and written resolutions, so a decision needed before the next scheduled sitting does not have to happen over email and then get retrospectively minuted. The resolution, the votes recorded against it and the resulting document form part of the same decision record as an in-meeting resolution.

The company secretary or board administrator is the heaviest user and usually the person who sponsors the purchase, because pack assembly and minute-taking are where the manual effort sits. Directors and committee members read papers, vote and sign. The chair uses the agenda and the action register. Executives contribute papers ahead of the meeting. Internal audit and the compliance function draw on the attendance, declarations and decision history rather than participating in meetings directly.