Hi there, it's been a long time since I wrote my last post. I've been so busy with a lot of projects, and without time to share some thoughts and tips with you...But I'm back.
This time I'd like to share a simple way to have many Meeting Workspaces in the same site, but organized. Well we could have a very big amount of MW's in our SharePoint web site, but what can we do to manage them or to have a way to organize our Meeting collaboration sites.
Imagine we could have like an index of all our MW's organized by date so we only need to remember the date when we join to discuss some topic and thats it...
What can we do...
First Imagine we already have our SharePoint Site, form example the Department work site, when all the information is going to stored, and as you know, every dept has also meetings related to any project or topic when planning and talking decision is needed....
1. First we could add to our SharePoint site a Calendar (If we dont have it yet)
2. Once we have created our Team Calendar (Remember that you can link your Outlook with your SharePoint Team Calendar), we're going to create a new event, and the last option of the new event is to specify if we'd like to create a MW dedicated to host information about the meeting, so we check the checkbox and finally clic the ok button.
3. After that SharePoint is going to present us the select Meeting Workspace WebPage Tamplate when we choose the kind of Meeting Workspace we'd like to use...(You can choose whatever you want, for this sample I'll use de Decision's focused MW).
4. Great!, now we have our brand new event on the calendar and If we clic on the detail's event we'll see a link to the Meetng Workspace already created.
5. Here comes the interesting part, once created the first MW (Tip: The first one put it a title and name about Meeting Manager or something...), we could create more events related to the Team Calendar (as if we had more meeting...).
6. So, we go back to our Team Calendar and create a new event, put all the info required and then "again" at the end of the requested info, specify that you want to create a dedicated MW to host all the info about that second event...
7. The next WebPage is no longer the one when you specify the MW tamplate you'd like to use, instead, SharePoint asks you If you'd like to use the same (first) MW already existing or creata a new one. Select the existing one, and specify the other data...
At the end, you'll see from the left side of your new MW site an index that will show you in a column all the date's representing all the MW you've created to host documents, info etc, related to each meeting you have within the Team Site.
Simple, but useful, and this aplies for SharePoint 2003 and MOSS 2007.