(4)Issue – Meeting information is de-centralized and In-correct versions of information exist

Posted by on January 27, 2012 Posted in Uncategorized

 Working together successfully in meetings as a team is critical in today’s competitive workplace. De-Centralization of information for meetings can cause challenging collaboration issues amongst co-workers. Modern work teams often share important documents and tasks among employees both within the same office and in other parts of the world in a given meeting. This can create challenges — and sometimes, big mistakes. Many teams have experienced the results of a poor team-collaboration effort: different versions of the same files circulating in e-mail or, even perhaps, the wrong version of an important document sent out to a client.

Meeting minutes can be scattered everywhere. Often this unstructured information is stored within emails, local drives, and network servers. Keeping local teams collaborating effectively in this scenario can be a great challenge challenge.

You and your team can use several strategies to collaborate more efficiently. Whether you are using printed documents, documents in e-mail, or new collaboration technology such as a Meeting Workspace, developing a plan can pay off. Start by evaluating your current collaboration methods for areas of improvement, such as how you handle version control, resolve conflicts, and deal with other issues that affect your team.

Create a collaboration plan and a calendar for your team. Also, a SharePoint Meeting Workspace can be a centralized place for your team to collaborate on meetings.

What is the agenda for today’s critical meeting? What did finally we decide in last week’s planning meeting? Where are the latest documents we are supposed to review for this meeting? If these questions sound familiar where you work, there is an alternative to scrambling through a many e-mail messages, attachments, and your file system to find the answers. That alternative is a SharePoint Meeting Workspace. A SharePoint Meeting Workspace provides a convenient, centralized place for people to collaborate on a project and have a record of what was decided in a key meeting.

You can view the workspace site and update it during the meeting. For example, you can list the agenda, update the attendees list to show who actually participated, record decisions, tracked tasks, and added documents. In This way, you have a complete record of the meeting for future reference.

After the meeting, use the workspace site to publish the meeting results. You will always see the most current version of a document the team is working on, so you don’t have to send large files through your key e-mail system each time content changes.