SharePoint Tip: Manage your staff meetings in one spot!

Today, I set up our staff meeting agenda for next Friday using SharePoint. It's awesome and I wish we had done this a long time ago!

Basically, I've emailed a meeting request to all JayThom staff members and I'm now monitoring who's accepted to attend or not! (I have to chase up a few who haven't responded yet!). I've also set up an Agenda (things that I want to discuss next week) and I've allowed all staff members to add to this as well. Such a practical area of SharePoint - we recommend all organisations start doing this now!

Here's how:

1. Go to your Outlook Calendar
2. Click 'New', then 'Meeting Request'.
3. In the 'To' box, enter the emails of those you wish to invite to the meeting.
4. In the 'Subject' box, enter the name of the meeting. (Eg: Staff Meeting 18th July, 2008)
5. Select the Start Time and Date.
6. From the top toolbar, click 'Meeting Workspace' (which brings up a panel on the right hand side).
7. From the panel, click 'Create'.
8. Click 'Change settings'.
9. For 'Select a location', select 'Other' and enter the SharePoint meeting URL.
10. For 'Select a workspace', select 'Decision Meeting Workspace'. (This allows more functionality when managing your meetings.
11. Select 'Go to workspace' and get started!

From here you can then create agendas, decisions, add documents, assign tasks, manage attendees and a whole lot more.

If you're having trouble with it, or would like more instructions, please post a comment here.

All about SharePoint!

Here's a useful site for basic users of SharePoint: the offical Microsoft Office SharePoint Blog.

Written by SharePoint experts, this blog will help you SharePoint users understand and use the many rich features of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Members of the SharePoint product team will also contribute posts in their areas of expertise. They'd like you to let them know which specific features or uses you would like to know about. They also have some guest bloggers who are experts in productivity, time management and collaboration – areas where SharePoint adds significant value. If you're an IT manager reading the blog, please pass the URL to your end-users -- it could save you a lot of time!

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