Miro, the leading online whiteboard platform designed for distributed team collaboration, announced Miro Smart Meetings, a powerful set of tools to run more engaging, collaborative, and productive meetings. Miro’s Chief Product Officer Varun Parmar unveiled the new solution onstage at Distributed, Miro’s third annual virtual user conference exploring how teams can deeply connect with one another, their work, and sense of purpose.

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“Miro Smart Meetings is purpose-built to create unforgettable meetings and workshops with more focus, structure, and collaboration.”

After nearly two years of remote work, organizations of all sizes still struggle when it comes to leading effective meetings, and the key challenges remain all too common: Creating a collaborative environment that suits different learning styles, keeping attendees focused and on track, and ensuring a productive use of time. Now through the use of Miro Smart Meetings, anyone can create and run a more worthwhile meeting, including engaging content and fun, collaborative experiences.

The Miro Smart Meetings experience begins in the Meeting Panel, a central hub where organizers and facilitators design, manage, and run their meeting. Every essential tool for running a great meeting – from those that add interactive content to those that launch activities like voting and breakouts – is featured in the easy-to-navigate panel. Miro Smart Meetings, available in beta today for all paid and Education plans, includes:

• Miro Smart Meetings Templates: Designed in collaboration with experts at industry-leading companies, including Deloitte, Dropbox, and Salesforce, Miro Smart Meetings Templates give meeting organizers an easy way to effectively lead some of the most popular meeting types, including design sprints, team building exercises, planning sessions, retrospectives, and more.
• Meeting Outline: In just minutes, Miro Smart Meetings can intelligently prepare a meeting agenda based on board content, including options for activities like breakouts and voting. The meeting organizer can choose the amount of time to spend on each item, and the built-in timer becomes red if time is exceeded, ensuring conversations don’t go off track.
• Meeting Settings: Now in Meeting Settings, meeting organizers and workshop facilitators can completely customize the collaborative experience for their participants by choosing the tools they can use, like sticky notes and stickers, and the content they see. The new Guided Participant Experience in Miro Smart Meetings minimizes distractions and ensures focus when it’s needed.

“The new era of hybrid work poses challenges for us all – particularly when it comes to running an engaging meeting with a clear purpose and meaningful outcome. This year we surveyed thousands of users and conducted multiple data studies to identify problem areas in most meetings, and found that the tools teams are using today still leave a lot to be desired,” said Andrey Khusid, Miro Co-founder and CEO. “Miro Smart Meetings is purpose-built to create unforgettable meetings and workshops with more focus, structure, and collaboration.”

Today Miro also introduced easier diagramming for its 25M users. Diagramming has always been at the core of visual collaboration because it makes sense of even the most complex topics. Now all users have access to faster shape creation and better corrections, plus more grid views to ensure proper alignment. For Miro Business and Enterprise plan users, there is even more with Miro Smart Diagramming, which includes advanced shape packs for AWS, Azure, Cisco, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and VMWare, plus popular methodologies like Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN).

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In addition to Miro Smart Meetings and better diagramming capabilities, Miro unveiled:

• Clustering: An easy, intelligent way to identify similar sticky notes and visualize themes. Clustering, which will be available on all paid plans, utilizes AI and machine learning technology to quickly make sense of a team’s input and surface the best ideas. Beyond meetings, Clustering can help organize all kinds of information, whether you’re doing research or just trying to make sense of your own thoughts.
• Stickers: All users can now bring more fun to the meeting with new ways to show how they’re feeling. With Stickers, participants can instantly show their reaction to a teammate’s work, communicate their thoughts and ideas, and create exciting board designs.
• Guest Role: Miro Business and Consultant customers can now invite an unlimited number of guests outside of their organization to collaborate on their board. Guests can only access the boards shared with them to ensure creators are still in control.

Distributed, Miro’s annual, virtual user conference takes place October 19-21, 2021, and brings together industry leaders and experts to help answer the burning questions on the minds of thousands of teams around the world. This year’s theme, “The Path to Reconnection,” explores how we stay connected and engaged as we usher in a new era of hybrid work. To register for the free event, visit https://miro.com/distributed2021. Speakers include Jake Knapp and Priya Parker, plus thought leaders hailing from Columbia University, Deloitte, SoftServe, The New Yorker, and Zendesk, among others.