There are several features in SharePoint that can aid organizations in managing the meeting process. The two main problem areas I see are:
- Successfully locating and booking meeting resources
- Physical meeting efficiency and productivity
Successfully locating and booking meeting resources
Outlook provides the ability to create a Meeting Request but users have trouble locating the meeting room in the Global Address List (GAL). Resources should be configured in the GAL according to this article.
A good naming convention for meeting rooms in the GAL can go along way to helping users find them.
Once a user has found a meeting room, they still have to remember to change the item from a person to a resource otherwise someone else could make a booking at the same time.
Here is a WSS team site that makes it much easier for a user to select the meeting room they require and successfully book it as a resource.
Users get to see a floor plan and a list of the rooms including alias name, phone number and capacity.
(A funny story, in my Wellington office we have a meeting room called Wairarapa and when adding external customers to the meeting they would get a meeting request with the location being in another part of the country:-)
To build this solution, Create a Tabbed Meeting Workspace site and create a document library with custom columns for the building details, alias, extension number and notes.
You need to change this library into "Series" item (go into "modify settings and columns for the list /document library and change the General Settings).
The document library holds the Outlook template files to book a room.
To create these Outlook template files, (one for each meeting room):
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create a new appointment in Outlook
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type in the location text
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switch to the scheduling tab and add the meeting room
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change the meeting room to a resource
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delete you own name
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select File/Save as...
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select the file type as an Outlook Template file (.oft)
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save to a temporary location
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copy the file into the SharePoint document library.
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Add a web part to the home page for the document library containing the .oft files
I changed the Meeting Rooms List View web part on the home page to a Data View Web Part (using SharePoint Designer) so that I could replace the document icon with my own image. By creating a tab for each floor, building or city you can filter the list of meeting rooms to be appropriate for each tab.
Physical meeting efficiency and productivity
The functionality seems to be identical between v2 and v3 so anything you see published for Outlook 2003 or WSS 2.0/SPS 2003 will also apply to the latest versions.
Users with Outlook 2003/7 will see the “Meeting Workspace” button when they create a meeting request. The confusing thing for a user is where to create the workspace. By default Outlook knows the last 5 SharePoint sites you have visited and will let you select one of these as the location in which to create your new workspace or you can type in the address for any existing SharePoint site. The problem is that most users will not have the rights to create sub sites. For an enterprise solution you might want all Meeting Workspaces to be created under a specific site collection.
The options you can set in Outlook are:
- Publish default, allow others — You specify a list of default servers that appears in the drop-down list, but users can specify other servers by using the Other workspace server pop-out dialog. In addition, other Windows SharePoint Services sites and document workspace sites that users visit appear on the server list. With this setting, no user MRU list is created.
- Publish default, disallow others — The default server list you specify is locked down for users. Users cannot access the Other workspace server pop-out dialog to specify servers that are not on the provided list. With this setting, no user MRU list is created.
- Specifying a list of servers and default templates — You can configure the list of servers and corresponding Meeting Workspace templates that will appear in a drop-down list when a user clicks Meeting Workspace in a meeting request. A single registry key or policy stores all the Meeting Workspace server list entries.
This
article describes how to use policy to define the workspace options available to a user.
Because a user needs to be a site administrator by default to create sub sites, I recommend the second option. This lets you use the top level site to describe the meeting best practices of your organization and then create a special role for everyone to have the right to create a subsite.
By placing the company wide SharePoint calendar in this top level site, you also have another way to create meeting workspaces for events that are broad (company meeting or social event).
From this top level site you also have an easy way of finding all the meeting workspaces that exists through the View All Site Content link.
If meeting rooms are a scarce commodity, your facilities manager might want to introduce a policy that all reoccurring bookings of a meeting room must have a SharePoint Meeting Workspace, otherwise the booking will be cancelled. This way you can see if there is any productivity being gained from all those meetings!
Note: you can disable the Outlook SharePoint integration functionality altogether but please don’t, it would be like giving someone a Ferrari but removing half the spark plugs.
Create a monthly view of only your appointments that have meeting workspaces
by following these Outlook menu Steps:
- View/Month
- View/ Arrange By/Current View/Define Views
- The “Current View Settings” will be highlighted. Click Copy and type in a
- name for your new view.
- Select your new View Name and click Modify
- Click Filter…
- Switch to the Advanced tab
- Click Field dropdown/All Appointment fields/Meeting Workspace URL
- Set Condition: to “is not empty”
- Pres OK to close all dialogs
You will now only see appointments that have a meeting workspace.