(12 ) Methods for using SharePoint meetings
Posted by on February 16, 2012 Posted in Uncategorized
One of the features that SharePoint has had for a while now is the Meeting Workspace site template. It’s a template to help co-ordinate content and activities relating to meetings. Used well, it can be a great time-saver and/or help improve the management of and outcomes from meetings. But it does have its gotchas and isn’t suitable for all types of meetings. This post is an overview of when and how to use SharePoint for managing meetings, including Outlook integration.
There are two methods for using SharePoint to manage meetings:
| Method: | Best suited for: |
| Within a Team Site
|
Frequent and/or informal meetings with few documents or where the same content is reviewed/updated from meeting to meeting.. . |
| Meeting Workspace (Dedicated Site) |
A special site template. For meetings that have a lot of unique content per meeting and/or take a lot of organising. Can be a single instance or a recurring series of meetings. |
The most basic way of using SharePoint to organize meetings: within a team site. It could be a simple document library (e.g. called Meeting Docs) within a general team site, or it could be a dedicated sub-site such as the image above, including a calendar and a library per type of meeting. Add a column to the document library called ‘Meeting Date’ and when you upload documents, you can enter the meeting date for future reference. You can also use it to create views based on meeting date if you want to make it easy for people to locate what documents relate to a given meeting.
The calendar is really an optional nice-to-have. Most people would create the meeting invite within their mailbox and send it out to all attendees. It’s then automatically added to individual calendars for everyone who accepts the actual meeting invite. Creating the appointment in a calendar on the SharePoint site just offers another visual prompt, outside a person’s mailbox. But it is a separate manual process .