Office 2003 integration with SharePoint Part 1 - Meeting Workspace

Although organizations do have ways for setting up meetings and handling tasks that emerge as a result of the meeting, the process may be inefficient.  SharePoint provides a way to bring the meeting objectives, agenda items, associated documents, tasks, and attendees all together in one centralized area.  This workspace can be created, or linked to, from the same screen used to create the meeting in Outlook 2003.

The ability to create a SharePoint meeting workspace, or linked to an existing workspace directly from Outlook 2003 when the meeting is created makes it easy to get into the habit of linking SharePoint meeting workspaces to meetings.  Attendees will automatically be added to the workspace, and objectives and agenda items can be entered.  Documents associated with the meeting can also be put on the site, or links created for accessing them.  When the meeting notices are sent, there is a link in the e-mail that takes to attendee directly to the meeting workspace.

For example, a team of engineers that will soon be starting a project for a client can be used to illustrate organizational use of the SharePoint meeting workspace.  Before going out to the client site, there is a project kickoff meeting to go over the project background, ensure that everyone understands the project goals and objectives, discuss project tasks and milestones, review project deliverables, and discuss any other issues that the team has regarding the project.  The project manager creates a meeting request in Outlook 2003 and also creates a SharePoint meeting workspace.  Therefore, a link to the project workspaces is contained within the email meeting invitation.  The project manager enters agenda items in the workspace; sets up events for major project milestones; provides a discussion area; and sets up links to the proposal, statement of work, and project plan.  Because there is a link to the meeting workspace in the meeting invitation, the team members can go directly to the site to review the necessary documents and task as soon as they get the invitation.

Here are steps for creating a Meeting Workspace on a SharePoint enabled Intranet for your Outlook meeting:

First create a meeting, add meeting attendees as usual, then the “Meeting Workspace” button becomes enabled.

Now you can click on the “Meeting Workspace” button to start creating your meeting workspace. First thing to do, configure your settings for Meeting Workspace by clicking “Change Settings”

Then click on the “Select a location” drop down, and choose “Other” to specific a “Workspace Server”. In my test case, it is http://office/meetings

Next, you will make your selection for "template language" and "template type", and click "OK" to complete the creation of your "Meeting Workspace".

As you can see below, once a "Meeting Workspace" is created, a link to this "Meeting Workspace" is embedded for you to access it on the Intranet.

Shown below is the view of a single occurrence meeting on the Intranet. 

And here is a view of a recurring meeting's meeting workspace.