Meeting Workspaces

Figure 3.4 shows a sample meeting workspace that was created using the Basic Meeting Workspace template (refer to Figure 3.2) and updated with some sample content. This site contains an Objectives Web Part, along with Attendees, Agenda, and Document Library Web Parts. The intention of this site is to provide information that the meeting attendees need to have access to in advance of the meeting, as well as to define the agenda of the meeting.

Figure 3.4. Meeting Workspace home page.

The creator of the workspace now has the ability to customize the workspace by adding additional Web Parts or content. You can imagine that a workspace created for a company trip or larger event could become quite complicated, but this is an excellent way to provide a centralized source of information for all attendees. As you'll see in Lesson 12, "Alerts and Document Versioning," alerts can be set by site members so they are sent an email if content in specified Web Parts change.

TIP

Be aware that workspaces can also be created from outside of SharePoint. For example, when a document is attached to an email in Outlook 2003, the user has the option of creating a document workspace to house the document and use that for collaborative purposes. Similarly, when a meeting is created in Outlook 2003, the option exists to create a meeting workspace, and the users invited to the meeting in Outlook will be able to access the site. Word 2003 and Excel 2003 offer similar features, where a document can be imbedded in a document workspace from these applications.