Improving Meeting Pack build times

While we have built the Our Cat Herder Meeting Pack functionality to handle word documents, excel files, images, powerpoint files and PDF files, there are certain documents that can take a lot of time to process and slow down your Meeting Pack build time.

How the Meeting Pack Build Works

The Meeting Pack is dynamic so it builds the Meeting Pack document on the fly or in realtime each time a user requests it (when you click the Meeting Pack button in a meeting). This is done to ensure the user has the most up-to-date document at all times.

When the Meeting Pack button is clicked Our Cat Herder loads each document, processes it to PDF form, paginates the documents if requested, and pairs your user's unique notes with the pages they were added to.

What can cause the Meeting Pack process to be slow?

The Meeting Pack is processing all the documents that are not PDF documents (word docs) to PDF. So the more complex or large the word documents are the more processing time the word document(s) take.

The process will be particularly slow if any of your documents have:

• large files sizes
• background images
• large tables (particularly with financial data) across multiple pages
• upward of 25 pages or more
• pages in the one document with different sizes or orientations (so one doc with both A4 and A3 or both portrait and landscape orientation)

If you for example were to have a 100 page word document with tables, multiple page sizes and background images on every page it is unlikely the Meeting Pack would generate in a useful time frame. The good news is there is a way to fix this.

How can I speed up the processing of my Meeting Pack?

The best way speed up the processing or build of your Meeting Pack for any meeting is to convert any word documents you need to attach to the meeting to PDF before attaching them to your meeting (saving the document as a PDF can be done directly from Word itself). With all documents as PDFs this means that the Meeting Pack can simply jump straight to combining them together, adding pagination and matching the notes to the correct page.

Smaller Files = Increased Speed

Generally the smaller you can make each of your files them the faster the process will run. The less files there are the faster it will run as well (although less files may not be practical in all situations).

Please note that the internet connection of the user requesting the pack will influence perceived speed as well because the pack has to generate and then the user must download it.For example on a slow internet connection a 100Mb file could take several minutes, but on a high speed fibre connection it could be a few seconds.