What is a board portal? A complete guide

A board portal is specialized software that makes it safe and efficient to deliver digital board packs. It provides a secure space for board members and administrators to access meeting documents, communicate, and fulfill their governance duties. By replacing printed packets, couriers, and emails, board portals simplify the meeting process—allowing directors and governance teams to focus on what matters most.

Today, board portals are standard across organizations of all sizes—from Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies to SMBs, nonprofits, healthcare systems, and schools. But what exactly should a board portal do? What should you expect? And when does it become a smart investment? This guide provides all the answers.

What features should a board portal offer?

A strong board portal should make building and sharing agendas and packs easy, give directors flexible access to documents from anywhere, and support authors in writing better reports. In short, it should save time for administrators and directors while improving the quality and security of your board meetings and materials.

Look out for key features such as:

• Agenda planning – Map out the year ahead and track time spent.
• Briefing tools – Streamline how you gather and manage reports to guarantee they hit the mark.
• Stakeholder tracking – Show how you meet your legal obligations, fulfill your governance duties, and act in the best interests of the company.
• Auto-save – Prevent the loss of work mid-task.
• Drag-and-drop pack creation – Make easy updates and changes.
• Notes and shared annotations – Collaborate before meetings.
• Advanced search – Quickly access any past board document when needed.
• Offline access – Help board members prepare for meetings and review materials on the go and without a connection.
• User-friendly design – Save less tech-savvy and technical users any hassles.

What should a board portal offer each stakeholder group?

For directors: easy, safe, on-the-go access

Directors expect their board portal to be as simple as paper—with all the benefits of digital. A great board portal should be simple to use, always up to date, and easy to search, read, and annotate documents. After all, this is primarily what they’ll use it for before meetings.

But the right board portal is more than a secure PDF viewer or Kindle for NEDs. It should give directors ample time to deliberate, prepare, and ask questions before meetings so that strategic discussions during actual meetings can be more in-depth and fruitful.

For directors, the best board portals:

• Instant, secure access to materials—online or offline
• Alerts for new or updated documents
• Effortless full-text search across all past digital board packs
• Notes that stay in place even when documents are updated, or page numbers change
• 24/7 support from real people—not chatbots

For company secretaries: reduced administrative burden

The primary function of a board portal is to reduce pre-meeting administrative work so secretaries and governance professionals can focus on adding value. So, company secretaries expect their portal to have automation tools that simplify agenda creation, report collation, and distribution—cutting prep time by up to 80%.

While no board portal can stop report authors from making last-minute changes to their papers, the more sophisticated board portals will support version control, preventing confusion and ensuring everyone is accessing the right information.

For the secretariat, the best board portals:

• Fast, intuitive interface that alleviate the administrative burden and save time
• Quickly publish packs, updates, and late papers.
• Drag-and-drop scheduling and update timings and section numbers on the fly.
• Easily arrange files of any format with drag and drop.
• Easy control over confidential document access.
• Version control and audit trail tracking.
• Streamline managing deadlines and review processes.
• 24/7 expert support from trained in-house specialists.

For report authors: clarity

The right board portal reduces endless back-and-forth emails with report writers, reducing the burden on your inbox and helping to protect sensitive documents. It also provides structure and guidance to help writers produce better reports and improve over time.

For report authors, the best board portals:

• Seamlessly manage briefings, task deadlines, and version control in one place.
• Provide an easy mechanism for feedback on papers between report writers and the company administrators.
• Equip report writers with best-practice templates, guidance, and training to improve reporting.

For the IT team: assurance

IT teams need confidence that the board’s tools are secure and reliable. Every organization has its own security needs, and your board portal provider should be ready to work directly with your IT team to meet them.

For IT teams, the best board portals offer:

• 24/7 in-house support from trained staff.
• Encryption in transit and at rest.
• Granular control over authentication and access rights, including two-factor log-ins.
• Remote wipe for lost or stolen devices.
• Full activity audit trail.
• Regular third-party security audits and penetration tests (e.g., ISO 27001)
• Business continuity and disaster recovery plans, including uptime guarantees.

Board portal security

Whether it’s an email breach or a phishing attack, the many vulnerabilities across everyday business practices tend not to be taken seriously until it’s too late, and organizations often overlook the security of board materials. Board members may underappreciate how risky sharing via email or physically printing and storing documents can be, especially for papers that contain sensitive information. Yet, any threat to a company’s security is a threat to its reputation that can have knock-on impacts on the organization’s financial position and the brand.

Board portal platforms, even in their basic formats, add an extra level of security by providing a secure, centralized platform for sensitive documents to be stored and shared. But it shouldn’t stop there. A strong board portal will offer advanced protections across infrastructure, data handling, external audits, and compliance.

When reviewing the security of board portals, consider:

• Encryption. There are two types of encryption to consider with a board portal: how data is stored when not being accessed (“at-rest” encryption), and how data is encrypted when it’s being sent from the server to a device (“in-transit” encryption). The level of encryption you should look for in your board portal provider is data that’s encrypted with RSA 4096-bit standard in transit and AES-256 at-rest.
• Infrastructure and cloud security. The infrastructure that delivers data over the cloud is an integral element of your security. Generally, board portal providers either build their software upon a major cloud provider such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS) or create and host their own secure data centers to store clients’ board information.
• Penetration testing. Board portal providers that regularly engage in penetration testing or ethical hacking to ensure their systems and data are secure demonstrate their commitment to their clients’ security.
• External audits and compliance. When selecting a board portal platform provider, it is essential to check that they have undergone extensive external audits, which take a close look at the procedures, controls, and security practices of the vendor. These audits focus on availability, security, privacy, confidentiality, and system integrity. Additionally, assess whether or not a prospective vendor meets the highest security standards (such as ISO 27001), as these are key indicators of how securely your information is held.

Key security features to look out for include:

• Cloud security.
• Two-factor authentication.
• Granular permissions.
• Encryption.
• Remote wipe.
• Biometric security.
• Audit trail.
• ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified.
• GDPR compliance.

How to find the right board portal for your organization

Before committing to a new portal or renewing a contract, make sure the provider has the experience, support, and technology to meet your needs.

Start with their track record. Before trusting your most sensitive information to the care of a third party, you should explore the track record of the software and the experience of the provider to see whether it’s right for your board, as well as engage with your IT team to ensure that prospective vendors meet your expectations of security and reliability. Board portal providers that have long-term partnerships with a wide range of organizations across different industries have spent years building their capability to deliver support and training and are generally the most credible and sought-after solutions.

You should also enquire about their technical support options and training materials to ensure that your board members can maximize the benefits that board portals can provide. Look for 24/7 specialist support; preparing for board meetings is stressful enough without the added worry that technology will let you down. With 24/7 access to a team of specialist support staff, you can prepare for your board meetings safely in the knowledge that help is available whenever you need it. Also, ask whether you will be provided with a dedicated account manager who can act as the main point of contact for supporting your board.

Finally, your company should see a tangible return on investment. Not only through time-saving, heavily reduced printing and couriering costs, and labor savings but also through more informed board discussions. By reducing the burden of operational tasks on boards and facilitating strategic discussions, you should see a direct translation of efficiency into improved decision-making. You can use our Board Reporting Calculator tool to see just how much money you are spending on your current process for the production, collation, and distribution of board packs, as well as our Board Reporting Assessment tool to track the progress made on the quality of your board information and meetings.

A great provider will have a strong reputation, proven results, and real support to back you up. And don’t forget to request a demo tailored to your workflow—it’s the easiest way to see if a platform fits.

Board portal from Board Intelligence

The Board Intelligence board portal offers a secure, user-friendly platform where board members can access, comment on, and collaborate around board materials in real time from any device. With high levels of automation and support, the platform helps directors and governance teams stay focused and prepared.

As the only board portal developed and hosted in the UK, Board Intelligence is trusted by over 75,000 directors and executives. Book a demo to see why so many organizations rely on it to run secure and productive meetings.