Frequently asked questions

Sherpany's meeting management software is best used by the leadership of large and midsize companies. Our software allows you to prepare your formal meetings with ease in a secure, digital environment. As a result, you can collaborate with your peers anytime and anywhere while keeping documents and communications confidential.

Below are some groups that benefit from using Sherpany:

• General management
• Divisional and regional management
• Boards of directors
• Committees

Our software helps you increase the productivity of your leadership meetings.

• Before the meeting

You are able to plan and prepare leadership meetings from any location, easily and securely. It is as simple to build, share, and access the meeting agenda and necessary documents as it is to keep these materials and participants up to date. Furthermore, you can utilise our collaboration feature to anticipate discussions with your peers, or use our voting tool to settle decisions even before the meeting starts.

• During the meeting

At this point, all the meeting participants are fully informed about every topic on the table and are ready to focus only on those which require further discussion. To help to keep you and all participants on the same page during discussions, use our presenter mode feature. This enables all attendees to follow the same screen during a presentation or while consulting a document, whether they are present in-person or virtually. As a result of these practices, meeting sessions become shorter and focussed and all participants save time.

• After the meeting

After the meeting, you are able to edit and approve the meeting minutes without having to wait for the next meeting. What’s more, you will be able to consult all the decisions taken and take them to the next level: execution. Assign tasks and responsibilities to specific stakeholders, track progress, and watch your projects move quicker.
 

No, Sherpany is not a videoconference tool. However, you can combine Sherpany with video conferencing tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or GoToMeeting. Click here to watch a short video on how to set up your remote meetings with Sherpany.

Sherpany creates the ideal conditions to facilitate your decision-making process, improving your:

• Preparation: With Sherpany, you have all your meeting materials (agenda, documents, private notes, minutes, etc.) with you at all times. This gives you the freedom to focus on your preparation when you want to.
• Collaboration: Our users communicate with each other and exchange ideas even before the meeting. As a result, information flows easily without the traditional constraints of time and space, and decisions are made quicker.
• Voting: Our digital Circular Resolution tool allows meeting participants to vote and consult voting results - even remotely - in just a few clicks. Click here to watch a short video about digital circular resolutions.

To facilitate the task of taking minutes, Sherpany's minutes are pre-filled by default - they are based on the meetings' agenda. 

You, or the designated minute taker, can either merely add in the missing information or can edit them completely. Then, once the minutes are ready, you can share them with all the participants directly in Sherpany and easily request their feedback and approval. The minutes can be approved and published to everyone outside of meetings which makes this process quicker and saves precious meeting time.

Sherpany gives you and your team numerous opportunities for enhanced collaboration. Some examples include:

• Agenda: The person in charge of organising meetings, which we call Admins, can receive feedback about the agenda and ask Participants to upload relevant documents. 
• Preparation: When preparing meetings, users can utilise comments to ask questions or discuss topics in advance with their team or assistant.
• Voting: The meeting participants can use the voting tool to vote on a given subject or simply to consult the poll results.
• Tasks & Decisions:  Users can rely on this feature to consult meeting decisions, assign tasks or to follow the progress of a given project.

No. Workstream collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams are mainly used for company-wide communication and videoconferencing, whereas Sherpany supports the end-to-end process of formal meetings for leadership teams. Therefore, neither tool replaces the other and they can be combined in order to realise your company's full potential.

Yes, you can use Sherpany even without an internet connection if you do it from your iPad, iPhone, Android, or Windows device app.

Yes, Sherpany's web app is compatible with all main operating systems and can be used from any computer or mobile device. Our Software as a Service (SaaS) application is also available as a native app for iOS, Windows and Android devices.

No, Sherpany is not suited for every kind of meeting. 

In fact, Sherpany was developed to improve leadership meetings. Therefore, we advise you to use Sherpany to manage your formal meetings such as management (general, divisional or regional), committee, and board meetings.

Sherpany allows you to have all of your meetings and documents in a single, secure place. You and the leaders in your company can use Sherpany during the entire meeting process:

• Before the meeting

Use Sherpany's app to consult the agenda and access supporting documents. It is possible to annotate or highlight on them - we can promise, paper will not be missed. You can also exchange comments with your colleagues to clarify any information before the meeting, and use the voting tool to collect opinions on a given subject.

• During the meeting

Now your team is completely aligned and ready to focus only on topics which require further discussion. This time is used to reach decisions on these topics and drive them forward. 

• After the meeting

Consult previous decisions or use our tasks & decisions feature to define new ones, assign tasks and responsibilities, and track the progress of these initiatives.

By taking these steps, leaders not only save time, but they also ensure that time spent in meetings is productive.

Sherpany drastically minimises the administrative burden of meetings. Our software digitalises the entire process and allows you to:

• Define and share the meeting agenda with ease
• Collect and distribute supporting documents in just a few clicks
• Collaborate with meeting participants at any time
• Take the meeting minutes in a pre-filled template
• Request meeting minutes approval even before the next meeting

These actions contribute to decreasing the time that is spent organising meetings and help you to conduct the process in an efficient manner.

Sherpany holds the following security certifications:

• ISO/IEC 27001 Information Security Management System (ISMS)
• ISAE 3000 Type II International Standard on Assurance Engagements
• FINMA 18/3 Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority

Sherpany’s data centres are located in Switzerland and offer a hosting environment with multiple layers of security. Our data centres include:

• A variety of physical security measures to prevent unauthorised access to the equipment
• Local redundancies to eliminate single points of failure
• A geographically independent set-up in order to be prepared for worst-case scenarios
• ISO 27001 certifications to demonstrate compliance with industry best practices

Sherpany complies with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the security standards outlined by the Swiss Data Protection Regulation and is unaffected by the US Cloud Act.

Sherpany’s customers can opt for a SaaS (Software as a Service) or a hybrid-cloud solution.

Data security is a top priority at Sherpany. As a result, there are several measures in place to 1) secure your meetings 2) safeguard your data, and 3) assure data privacy. These include but are not limited to: two-factor authentication; different levels of access to meeting documents; end-to-end encryption methods; compliance with the EU's GDPR and the security standards outlined by the Swiss Data Protection Regulation. Please visit our security page to discover all our measures.

As an Administrator of your Sherpany room, you are able to define who has access to specific meetings, agendas, and documents.

Once onboard, Sherpany will provide you with the following support options:

• 24/7 support: we give your organisation 24/7* support in English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Your users can reach out to us via phone, email or chat. * 24/7 support is included in the Standard and Enterprise plans.
• Review and planning meetings: we conduct consulting meeting sessions where your assigned customer success manager reviews your usage of Sherpany, presents you with new features, and gives you advice on how to further improve your meetings.
• Sherpany Knowledge Center: an online platform where you can find tutorials, our latest updates on features, modules, and best practices.

We are able to onboard a leadership team of 20 members in less than three weeks. However, onboarding can be done faster depending on your availability.

For companies onboarding more than 100 users, we offer an automated onboarding process.

We offer you a range of professional, support, and technical services.

Our professional services include meeting culture assessments, transformation services, onboarding and review, and planning meetings.

Our support services include 24/7 support and access to our product board, ambassador program, and knowledge centre.

Our technical services include data extraction, sideloading, customer audits, reports creation and technical integrations.

Always. Our support team is available 24/7* so you can reach out to us at any time. On average, our support team answers phone calls within five seconds.
* 24/7 support is included in the Standard and Enterprise plans

Our support is available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Azend^® is a framework developed by Sherpany which helps you to improve your meetings. This framework combines a set of practices based on leading research in the field of meeting science and our wealth of experience in helping leaders to tackle their meeting problems.
 
Azend^® empowers you to run productive meetings. How? It is designed to bring people, processes, and technology together to find the best way of achieving goals. 

Productive meetings have a positive impact on employee engagement, innovation, productivity and teamwork. The Azend® approach to leadership meetings will help you reshape your meeting culture and enjoy these benefits. Furthermore, it will speed up decision-making, increase ownership of meeting outcomes, and save you time.

Many of our customers are already experiencing the benefits of Azend®. For instance, Dr. med. Thomas Sigrist, executive member at the Swiss Clinic Barmelweid, is now able to work with his peers asynchronously and to anticipate discussions before meetings. The CEO of Röchling Group, Hanns-Peter Knaebel, told us how he is able to make decisions quicker and estimates that meetings are 20% more effective and efficient.