Meeting Workspaces in Windows SharePoint Services are a great feature to
organize a single meeting and have all information and documents together in one place. The
SharePoint Meeting Manager extends this functionality with automatic minute generation and a lot of business improvement.
But it is not that easy to get an
overview of all meetings that took place in the
organisation or department. This article describes how to create a
meeting dashboard using the SharePoint Meeting Manager.
How to create a SharePoint meeting dashboard using the Meeting Manager
Lets assume a business requirement like this: We want to have a SharePoint site http://portal/sites/meetings and inside there we want to be able to create a meeting whenever we need one and it has to be stored within this site. And if we want to see which meetings took place on February 10th, they all will be there.
The main idea is to place all meeting workspaces as a subsite directly unter http://portal/sites/meetings and use a SharePoint Calender List to create them. You might say, that you normally create your workspaces from Outlook and that this way does not work for you. Let's have a look at the options when you create a workspace from Outlook (2003 + 2007).
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At this point it is possible to select an existing meeting workspace in Outlook and connect your meeting with the SharePoint site.
If there are meetings without a workspace, just add them to your calendar as a simple item.
Mainly the job is done. We have all meetings in a single Calendar list. We create workspaces as a subsite from our dashboard and we use the Calendar list to create these workspaces. If we need, we can connect our workspaces with Outlook appointments.
This Calender is our dashboard! You can select a day to see all meetings taking place, get an overview about appointments next week or next month. And you have all features, a SharePoint Calendar has:
- Connecting with Outlook (Overlay View)
- Edit in Datasheet
- Sort, Filter, Views
