SharePoint Meeting Workspaces and Outlook

One of my favourite features of SharePoint 2007 is the integration with my Outlook calendar.

Many of my meetings are monthly affairs. I work as part of a multinational group – US, Europe and Asia - we share goals, tasks and weather reports every month. We have some recurring agenda points, some occasional agenda points and some “you’ll never guess what happened to me this month” agenda points that come out of the blue. This was a typical monthly schedule for one of the meetings:

• Day 1: meet with my colleagues via teleconference. Leave the meeting with some scribbled notes on who’s going to do what. Energy levels high.
• Day 2: Gather together my notes still expecting to get cracking. Problem: what exactly was expected of me? Was I meant to be sharing that action with Frank? Hmm… the minutes and action log will be out soon I’ll wait until they get circulated.
• Day 3: Day 1 is a distant memory…

 

• Day 15: Meeting chair circulates the meeting action log via email. [Much too busy to concentrate on them at the mo’.]
• Day 16: Meeting chair circulates minutes via email.
• Day 17: Someone corrects an error in the minutes by email.
• Day 20: Meeting chair asks for agenda points for next meeting via email. Oh and by the way, when is everyone free for the next meeting?
• Day 21-25: Dozens of emails from my group going back and forth on various subjects all associated with the monthly meeting but with no easy-to-define connection between their subject lines.
• Day 30: Three hours before the second meeting make an attempt at finding all those email threads, trying desperately to make it look as though I’ve completed my actions and digging out that agenda.

 

• Meeting starts: weather reports are exchanged – 43 degrees in New Delhi? Ouch.
• Any comments on last month’s minutes?…Why do I always forget to read last time’s minutes? [silence is broken by someone mumbling “yeah, I think they were OK”] – everyone wholeheartedly agrees.
• Couple of agenda points in… Action log updates. Anyone got any updates? Most people have forgotten that they had any (but make a decent attempt at disguising this).
• Next agenda point “That Big Things meeting that happens every so often and is always on the agenda but is actually only relevant every three months or so”. Everyone read the emailed report from the meeting – they just can’t quite remember the bit that they were going raise for discussion. They certainly can’t find the report in the awkward 20 seconds silence following the question. No-one raises any discussion points so the Big Things meeting is safely put to bed until next time…

 

I had attempted to put all of these things together for myself with OneNote, and had some success, but I found that it’s free-form nature allowed me to get too sloppy and I’d usually miss something. This is where SharePoint 2007 came to the rescue – and where “Not another bloody SharePoint site” raised its head.

Bringing some sense to your SharePoint mess

One of the major problems I had with SharePoint 2003 was the sheer number of seemingly unrelated sites, workspaces and lists that I’d been invited to. I lost count of the variety of places that colleagues had posted things. SharePoint 2007 helps out in a couple of ways.

1. My sites

[Put a picture here of the my sites bit]

2. Better integration with Outlook

Meeting workspaces. Meeting workspaces maintain a link with your Outlook calendar so that instead of dozens of unrelated sites, you can organise your sites around, say, your weekly meeting with your staff,  or the monthly review with your boss. Psychologically, this is a lot less taxing for me because my sites are all in the one place where I spend most of my time – Outlook.

Not another bloody SharePoint site

I’m writing this because that’s usually the first reaction to someone posting their latest procedure, visit report, audit or agenda to SharePoint. I used to think the same way for a couple of reasons.

1. SharePoint was implemented with no training or awareness sessions whatsoever. Result: people started using their new toy without really knowing why they were doing it.

Sender: “I’ve posted the document to SharePoint”

Me: “Which SharePoint site? You’ve got dozens of them! Which folder? Which document? A hyperlink might have come in handy there!

2. SharePoint 2003 is pretty ugly and quite often hindered things getting done.

The way it was implemented in the place I work, it looked very much like Windows Explorer but more confusing. Click on a file to open it, read it, edit and make comments on it (this is SharePoint after all). Save it, discover that “This document was opened as read only”, curse it, save it with a new name, forget to overwrite the original, end up with two documents neither of which you dare delete six months later because you can’t work out which one was the latest version.

Although SharePoint is meant for collaboration and sharing, in the majority of cases it is used for dumping something somewhere because the author feels guilty about storing it away on their own hard drive.

My company recently introduced SharePoint 2007 with a self service  set-up. I’ve been playing around with it and I think that we might actually get somewhere with it.

It’s hardly a piece of cake but with a bit of perseverance and some Googling it’s not too difficult to get to a situation where you can actually start to be more productive as a group than you were as a individuals.

I’ll post some case studies here. I hope you find them useful.

hmmm

where does this go?