Improving Your Outlook

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One of the advances in Outlook 2003 is the capability to plan meetings and share a SharePoint Team Services meeting workspace. A meeting workspace is a Web site that provides a centralized location for all materials and information for a meeting. This shared workspace can be a repository for documents, links, and notes that all attendees of the meeting can access before and after the meeting.

If you have access to SharePoint Team Services, your organization can utilize meeting workspaces. The following example illustrates how your organization could benefit from a shared meeting workspace.

In our example, your organization is in the planning stages for a major software upgrade. This upgrade requires planning, strategizing, and making decisions. Many meetings are planned during this upgrade. Your next project-planning meeting utilizes a shared meeting workspace.

Create a normal meeting invitation. Invite attendees, enter a subject, location, and reminder. Then click the Meeting Workspace button to display the meeting workspace task pane shown in Figure 13.17.

Figure 13.17. The meeting workspace task pane enables you to specify a Team Services server and a template for the workspace.

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If you've never used a workspace before, you're prompted to enter your server information and select a default template. If this isn't your first meeting workspace, Outlook remembers your default settings. After you've entered the server and template information, click OK and then click Create. When your meeting workspace has been created, your meeting request will look like Figure 13.18.

Figure 13.18. Your meeting request will contain a link to the meeting workspace in the body of the request.

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To visit your meeting workspace, click the link in the body of the meeting request to display your meeting workspace (see Figure 13.19).

Figure 13.19. Your meeting workspace has a section for attendees, objectives, agenda, documents, action items, and decisions.

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The attendees section of the agenda tracks who has responded to your meeting request. To add an agenda item, click the Add New Item link under the agenda section to display the screen seen in Figure 13.20.

Figure 13.20. Any attendee can add agenda items and set a time for those items to be addressed.

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You can also upload documents to your meeting workspace. Because you need to decide between several different software packages, you can upload the software specification sheets for each of those software packages to your meeting workspace. Every document uploaded can be assigned a category.

Using a meeting workspace to share documents related to the meeting ensures that attendees can always access the most current version of the document. Attendees can check out documents to edit them and then check them back in. This increases accuracy and reduces email overload from attendees sending large files back and forth every time there's a revision.

Now that you've uploaded documents, entered a preliminary agenda, created action items, and entered your meeting objectives, attendees will see something similar to Figure 13.21 when they access the meeting workspace.

Figure 13.21. View your shared meeting workspace after entering all appropriate information.

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After you've done all this work, what if one of your attendees proposes a new time for the meeting? Change the time of the meeting and Outlook will connect to your shared workspace and update the meeting time. You can also update the subject, attendees, and location directly from the meeting request and Outlook will update your shared workspace.

When the meeting is over, you can utilize the meeting workspace to track action items, post meeting minutes, and list decisions made as a result of the meeting.

The meeting workspace will remain until you delete it from the server. To delete your meeting workspace, click the link for My Meeting Workspaces and click the Delete link next to the title of the workspace you want to delete.



Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
ISBN: 0789729563
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 426

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