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SharePoint Products and Technologies - Pointing to Share the Knowledge - Luis Du Solier G.

How to create a Meeting Manager, using Meeting Workspaces in SharePoint (2003 or 2007)

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.

Comments

 

Al said:

This works with a non-recurring event but does not seem to work with recurring events, at least I don't get the option to use an existing meeting workspace.  Is there any way of sharing a meeting workspace between multipule recurring events?

November 2, 2007 9:25 PM
 

Luis Du Solier G. said:

Hi Al,

I have not done any tests with that option, and I think would be interesting....

But as far as I know, If you create a recurring event I supoose you could create algo as for any other independent event a meeting workspace...

The idea I was trying to share with my readers in this post is the posibility to have imagine a Meeting Workspace that by itself contain all the meeting workspace thet someone will be creating for any event and in this scenario would be easier to follow all the meeting workspace cause they will be contained as if they were in some kind of a related index within the primamry meeting workspace...

So, finally, the only thing you're sharing is something like an index to enter any of your meeting workspace, not having all your info within the same meeting workspace, and I think is the best aproach indeed, dont you..?

Thanks for sharing your results Al...

Cheers!

Luis.

November 5, 2007 9:28 AM
 

Gary Moore said:

I have a question and wonder if there is a workaround OR if it's just not possible. Here is the scenario:

From a Calendar, a contributer creates an appointment/event.  The final option on the appointment/event screen allows the contributer to use a meeting workspace based on that appointment.  There is no option available for the contributer to link to an existing meeting workspace (for which they have contributer permissions). Selecting to create a meeting workspace allows the contributer to fill in all the details to create the meeting workspace but after clicking OK receives the following message:

Error: Access Denied

You are currently signed on as "contributer user id"

Sign in as a different user

Request access

Which is understandable as they only have contributer permissions (plus, I thought MOSS 2007 was supposed to hide those features that a user never had permissions for?)

Is there a way to allow a contributer to link to an existing meeting workspaces without having to assign them permissions which would enable them to create sites below the meeting workspace or allow them to edit the page?

Any guidance would be much appreciated!

February 6, 2008 3:03 AM

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Posts (c) their respective authors. Everything else (c) 2007 SharePoint Experts