Creating a Meeting Workspace by Using a Template

There are two different ways to create a Meeting Workspace in the browser:

1. Create a new SharePoint site by using one of the five Meeting Workspace templates installed by Windows SharePoint Services. This new SharePoint site has all of the functionality of a Meeting Workspace, but is not tied directly to any event.

2. Use a calendar event to generate the Meeting Workspace associated with this event. The new site will forever be associated with the event that was its genesis.

Creating and accessing a Meeting Workspace from Office Outlook 2007 is covered in Chapter 11.

When you create a Meeting Workspace by using the Basic Meeting Workspace template, three default lists are automatically added: Objectives, Agenda, and Attendees. A document library is also created to house meeting documents. These lists and the library function just like any list or library described in previous chapters. Each list has a Web Part on the front page of the Meeting Workspace, making it easy to interact with the information within any of them. Additionally, the Attendees list displays the name of the user who created the Meeting Workspace as the meeting organizer.

In the following exercise, you will create a Meeting Workspace by using the Basic Meeting Workspace template to store notes from the weekly status meeting.

OPEN a top-level SharePoint site. The exercise will use the http://wideworldimporters site, but you can use whatever site you wish. If prompted, type your user name and password, and click OK.

BE SURE TO verify that you have sufficient rights to create a site. If in doubt, see the Appendix on page 435.

1. From the Site Actions menu at the top right of the page, choose Create to display the Create page.

Tip 

Oddly, if your parent site is a Meeting Workspace, it won’t have a Create option in the Site Actions menu. Therefore, you must click the list name in one of the Web Parts on the home page, click View All Site Content at the top of the Quick Launch, and then click Create on the toolbar.

2. In the Web Pages group, click Sites and Workspaces to display the New SharePoint Site page.

3. In the Title box, type the name of the workspace you would like to create, such as Weekly Status Meeting.

4. In the Description box, type a description for the Meeting Workspace, such as This site contains the latest information regarding the weekly status meeting.

5. In the URL Name box, type the URL for the Meeting Workspace, such as weeklystatus.

See the Naming a URL sidebar in Chapter 3, “Creating and Managing Sites,” for details about good naming conventions for the URL Name field.

6. In the Template Selection area, click the Meetings tab and select Basic Meeting Workspace.

7. Leave the default settings for the three remaining sections. They are described in detail in Chapter 3.

8. Click Create and a new site is created at http://wideworldimporters/weeklystatus. You are taken to the newly created Weekly Status Meeting page.

CLOSE the browser.