Chapter 8: Working with Meeting Workspaces

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Chapter at a Glance

Creating Meeting Workspaces, page 204. Managing Recurring Meetings, page 210. Use the Standard and Advanced Web Part Galleries, page 216.

In This Chapter, You will Learn to:

• Create a Meeting Workspace by using a template.

• Create a Meeting Workspace for a calendar event.

• Understand the home page of a Meeting Workspace.

• Add an objective to a Meeting Workspace.

• Add an agenda to a Meeting Workspace.

• Add an attendee to a Meeting Workspace.

• Add a Things To Bring list.

• Add a Web Part to a Page tab.

Every company holds meetings. These meetings often have a specific agenda; if they don’t, the company would benefit if they did. Sometimes participants need to prepare for a meeting by completing a task or two prior to the meeting. The task may be simply reviewing a document, assembling a list of questions, or perhaps creating a prototype of something to bring to the meeting. A meeting can become inefficient or even ineffective because the preparation tasks that participants are expected to complete are not communicated effectively. All too frequently when participants do make preparations, they use an outdated version of a document or complete the wrong tasks because they are confused by the barrage of tasks sent through numerous e-mails. In addition, after the meeting is over, meeting notes or follow-up steps may need to be provided to the participants. Wouldn’t it be nice if all of the notes, documents, tasks, and other meeting details could be kept in a centralized location that was easy to find? A bonus would be if all of the content in this centralized store could be searched.

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services provides a site template called a Meeting Workspace that helps improve communication before and after a meeting by supplying a common place to store information that is relevant to the meeting. By providing a single point of communication, Meeting Workspaces can help make meetings more efficient-something every organization, both large and small, can use.

In this chapter, you will learn to create a Meeting Workspace by using a site template. After the Meeting Workspace is created, you will learn how to add items such as objectives, agendas, and attendees to the workspace. You will also learn how to customize the Meeting Workspace by adding a Web Part and then adding items to the list represented by that Web Part.

Chapter 11, “Using Windows SharePoint Services with Outlook 2007,” contains a section that focuses on creating Meeting Workspaces from a Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 calendar appointment displayed on the ribbon when inviting others to join the meeting. Therefore, the current chapter focuses only on the browser interface.

Important  

Before you can use the practice sites provided for this chapter, you need to install them from the book’s companion CD to their default locations. See “Using the Book’s CD” on page xix for more information.

Important  

Remember to use your SharePoint site location in place of http://wideworldimporters in the exercises in this chapter.