SharePoint 2010 - Meeting Workspaces

Introduction

Not new in SharePoint 2010 but still pretty interesting site templates: Meeting Workspaces. Are you looking for a site where you can share documents and create objective points to discuss for the monthly staff meeting? Do you want keep track of all the people coming to the Christmas event? Don't look any further because the SharePoint meeting workspaces will fulfill your wildest dreams ;-)
From my point of view a meeting workspace will be, 9 out of 10 times, created from a SharePoint calendar. It works pretty ease, when you create a new calendar item you have the following option:



If you select this option and confirm the new item, the following screen will appear:



The options speak pretty much for themselves. You can create a new Meeting Workspace or connect to an existing one. The workspace needs to have a title and url, automatically the name of the Calendar item will be shown. Do you want to inherit the permission of the site or create new ones? And finally you can select the language (if language packs are installed). Confirm your choices and the following screen will appear:



So which workspaces are available? You can choose from the following:

• Basic Meeting Workspace
• Blank Meeting Workspace
• Decision Meeting Workspace
• Multipage Meeting Workspace
• Social Meeting Workspace

I will discuss all the workspaces in the following paragraphs. For now confirm you choice and the workspace will be created.

Basic Meeting Workspace

This workspace is great for weekly or monthly meetings with your team. The owner of the workspace can easily create objectives to discuss during the meeting. The attendees can be listed:


The owner has to check which users accepted the invite of the meeting, which was probably sent with Outlook. There is unfortunately no integration with Microsoft Outlook and this list (and the whole workspace). I don't really see the point of the agenda especially if you created this workspace from a calendar item. The document library is useful as always.

Blank Meeting Workspace

I hope it is not a surprise that this workspace is empty ;) This workspace can be modified to your wishes (also the other workspaces of course). I would use this workspace for creating a template that can be used through your organization.

Decision Meeting Workspace

This workspace is very similar compared to the Basic Meeting Workspace. You now have two new lists: Tasks and Decisions. The task list can be used for assigning a task to a colleague after discussing an objective. The task list can be connected to Outlook or SharePoint Workspace so the users always have access to the tasks quickly. The decisions, created after discussing the objectives, can be added in the decisions list. You can now always keep track of these important items.

Multipage Meeting Workspace

The Multipage Meeting Workspace contains two extra pages that can be used to show other lists or libraries. To be honest, you will probably not use this workspace. The basic and decision meeting workspace will do the job for you.

Social Meeting Workspace

The main purpose of this workspace is for company events. New in this workspace are the lists directions and things to bring. Easy to use and to provide your co-workers with all the party information they need. Also pretty useful are the discussion and photos pages. You can discuss the details of the event and afterwards upload all the photos. We always use this workspace for our company events.

Repeating meetings

The power of the meeting workspace comes with creating a repeating event. You get for every meeting date the change to add objectives, attendees, agenda items and documents. When you click on a new date the previous items will not be shown. This is a great way to collect important information in one place. Do you want to see what was discussed four weeks ago? Just click on the date and there it is.

Conclusion

I find the meeting workspaces really useful. It is easy to share important information and documents. Just like any site you can easily add new lists or libraries or change the look and feel of the workspace. It will proof to be really important for repeating events. I only hope there will be more integration with Outlook in the future.

Posted in: SharePoint 2010, SharePoint Online 2010