SharePoint Meeting Workspaces - Part 2 ~ Blog moved to www.jasperoosterveld.com

My article about the SharePoint Meeting Worspaces got published at NothingbutSharePoint:

https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/SharePoint-Meeting-Workspaces.aspx

I stated the following:

“The owner has to check which users accepted the invitation to the meeting, which was probably sent with Outlook. There is, unfortunately, no integration with Microsoft Outlook and this list (and the whole workspace).”

One of the visitors (Josh F) corrected me and said there was integration possible! He was right :) I quickly found the following blog post:

http://support.sherweb.com/Faqs/Show/how-to-create-sharepoint-meeting-workspaces-using-outlook-2010-sharepoint-2010

Never too late to learn ;-)

There was another interesting response by Kerri that there could be trouble using the automatic site creation with Outlook. That got me interested and I went up to the test floor immediately! I followed the instructions to configure the workspaces icon and selected a site to create the workspace.

Tip:

The site name cannot end at .aspx. The configuration will not accept it.

After you click Create the following message appears in the e-mail:

Pretty cool :)

I can see the new meeting workspace in SharePoint:

I can also see the attendees:

You can see that under Response it says None. I thought this made sense because I created the workspace before I send the meeting request. So I tried to first send the request and when I got a confirmation I created the workspace but that did not change it. That means every attendee needs to change this manually.

What happens if I delete one of the meetings? I get the following message in the workspace:

I now have a couple of options:

I can move all the content from this day to another day:

This seems cool BUT when I select another date I get the following message:

I tried this and all my content from the day where I want to put my content got replaced! That is very strange. So the only real options you have is keeping the day or if you don’t care just delete it.

What happens when you delete the whole meeting series? After you deleting the series, the workspace gives the following error:

The workspace did not get deleted so that is good news. Only now the issue Kerri talked about:

“You see, when the meeting is deleted, you can never realign another meeting with the site again. Horrible situation to be in!”

Kerri is right, it is not possible to reassign the workspace to a new meeting. That is really a shame. Kerri also talked about the content structure:

“Those folders don't work like normal folders. Meeting workspaces don't have the same functionality as normal team sites, you can't send items out of libraries like other libraries, they are beasts of their own - and I avoid them like the plague!”

The structure is unclear. I added some documents in the document library of one meeting and then uploaded some more in the next meeting. There is only no way to see all the documents at the same time. If someone knows how to do this please let us know J