For teams working remotely, having a visual collaborative workplace is important. Sure, you could share files using Slack or email, but if you want your team to be able to collaborate, being able to do it online in real-time is really important.
Luckily there are lots of options available now.
Mural is one such online application.
What do I need to Use Mural?
Mural works in the browser, with apps available for iOS, Windows, Microsoft Teams and Surface Hub.
How Can Mural Help My Team?
Whether your team works remotely from different locations, or from the office, having a tool that helps with facilitation of differents types of meetings in a nice user friendly interface, that keeps a shareable and printable record of the output is important.
If everyone is in the same location, a whiteboard and sticky notes is an options, of course, and taking a photo of the whiteboard afterwards is always a good way to share the output.
What Are Some of the Features of Mural?
- Sticky Notes of various colours and shapes
- Shapes and Connectors
- Icon Library
- Frameworks: Layout to arrange the Mural, Design-related Frameworks, Agile, Business, Calendars. Frameworks give you the basic layout for facilitation techniques (think of them as simple Templates).
- Image upload
- Library function
- File Import
- And of course, your typical drawing function
- Other Mural functions:
- Chat
- Comments
- Activity log: so you can see who changed what on the board
- Text Search in the current Mural or canvas
- Timer
- Voting Session
Online Help and Tutorials
Online help looks to be pretty extensive, and reveals other functionality (like CSV export) that isn’t immediately apparent. There are also different levels of training available, including tailored training for the Enterprise level.
Templates
For online whiteboards, it is pretty standard to include templates of commonly used techniques or frameworks. Mural provides a number of them, and you can create your own by creating a Mural (whiteboard) and saving it as a template.
What I like about the Mural templates is that they cover a wide range of techniques and frameworks, from areas such as design thinking, Agile, OKRs, interview templates, team organisation templates, mind mapping, SWOT analysis, including some from big companies like Atlassian (The Playbook). What makes they great is the Outline feature, which walks you through the process step by step as you facilitate the meeting or workshop.
It is easy to understate the importance of the templates. But if you have experienced poor workshops that just consumed time without reaching any sort of outline, or if you’re just looking to expand your facilitation toolbox, then these templates offer quick a lot of value for you and for your team. It is quite possible to find just the right template to suit the goal of the meeting or workshop, and proving a real return on investment of everyone’s time.
Pricing
Mural offers three levels of pricing, beyond an initial 30-day free trial.
| Starter | Plus | Enterprise Network |
| 1-50 Memberships | 10-50 Memberships | 50+ Memberships |
| $12 Per Membership | $20 Per Membership | Contact Mural for pricing |
| Includes Start features, plus priority support, premier education and SAML SSO | Includes Plus features, plus additional features such as tailored education programs, MURAL built templates, enterprise APIs, and so on. |
Compliance
MURAL is GDPR and CCPA compliant.
