SharePoint Meeting Manager

• What to store?
• How many mandatory fields are necessary? Try to keep them at a minumum!
• How should data be categorized?
• How to best find information?
• What permissions are needed? Some meeting notes will need strict permissions, others can be open to all users. How to manage that in the best way?
• For how long should we store the meeting notes? How can the retention be set quickly?
• Should the meeting notes be stored in lists or libraries? Lists are more powerful in general, but if it should be possible to print the meeting notes you need to use libraries.In Peter’s example he has decided to store:

• Title (mandatory)
• Notes (multiple lines)
• Comments (multiple lines with append changes)
• Chairman (person)
• Internal attendees (person or group, possible to select multiple people)
• External attendees (multiple lines)
• Department (managed metadata, mandatory)
• Title (mandatory)
• Action points (hyperlink to new tasks list).Peter will create and publish two content types.: a Meeting list content type and an Action Point list content type. He uses the Content Type Hub, but today the modern SharePoint Admin center has a Content Type Gallery that is connected to the Hub. It is often easier to create the content type there, but if you have to go into the Hub site there are links from the Gallery.

By having the content types in the Content Type Hub you can use them for the whole tenancy. Otherwise you must create them for each site collection. Note that it can take an hour before the content types are displayed in each site. If it takes longer, check that you have really published it!
When the new content types are created, Peter creates a Meeting and an Action Point list in the team site for each department. He uses a template to do that easily.If you are like most office workers, you spend a lot of time in meetings. The problem is, every meeting is run and recorded differently. Action items fall off the radar and never get followed up on, meeting notes are not accessible in a centralized area, and all that time and money that went into organizing and participating in the meeting was wasted. Many organizations simply deal with this as the status quo, but it doesn’t need to be like this. AvePoint Meetings Pro is here to help.Because it was built on SharePoint, AvePoint Meetings Pro has become the go-to replacement for organizations that were using SharePoint Meeting Workspaces (a template that was available in prior versions of SharePoint), and a valuable tool for any company wanting to make their meetings more productive.For companies that use AvePoint Meetings Pro, meeting agendas, summaries, notes, tasks, document attachments and other meeting assets are formatted uniformly and stored centrally for each of their meetings. That means attendees know where to find the information from past meetings to execute any action items. Features such as agenda timers and the ability to mark agenda items complete and assign tasks right in the app keep meetings productive and focused. Meeting attendees will no longer find themselves asking questions like “what did we decide about that?”, “who attended that meeting?”, “did I capture that in my notes?”, or “what did I miss?” because everything is recorded and accessible in the Meetings app. And of course the Outlook Plug-In for Meetings allows users to initiate new meetings right from Outlook.● Browser-based UI and a mobile app with live, multiuser information capturing functionalities
● Automatically create a new meeting, or duplicate a
recurring or existing one, invite new and set attendees, and take attendance
● Embed invitations to Meetings from Outlook using the
Meetings Outlook plug-in, allowing end users to easily
create, schedule, and modify online meetings from
one place
● The automatic sync between Meetings Pro and
Exchange Server allows users to view and edit all tasks
assigned to them directly through Outlook
● Users can upload attachments or add links before,
during and after meetings
● Provide a centralized space for attendees to join
discussions and collaborate on meeting items
● Users can move agenda items around with a simple
drag and drop capability
● Outlook calendar and AvePoint Meetings Pro
automatically syncs to enable users to view and join
any meeting
● Search by keyword to quickly find specific meetings,
locate important information, attachments, attendees,
links, etc.
● Allow end users to view and track tasks, updatestatuses and see future tasks through a single pane of glass
● Centralized dashboard where administrators can track
the status and progress of tasks through intuitive
reporting
● Hosted on Windows® Azure®, AvePoint Meetings Pro
takes advantage of cloud scalability to easily support
any number of business users and SharePoint sites.
With Azure’s 99.95% monthly SLA, business users are
provided with reliable access to their most up-to-date
tasks and calendars
● AvePoint Meetings Pro uses site-level security
trimming to delegate and limit the accessibility of
meeting information, ensuring it’s only granted to the
appropriate audienceNot sure about you, but I have probably spent at least half of the time from my 15+ years in Project Management, in some sort of meetings… Yeah, I know, it is a lot, but you know how it goes in the corporate world, it is just meetings, meetings, meetings, all the time. Being a PMP-certified Project Manager, I am also very particular with the documentation generated with each meeting. If you attended and survived a 1-2 hour meeting and there were no documents/artifacts produced, it was most likely a waste of time for you and whoever organized the meeting.The first decision you need to make is where your project meeting documents will reside. It really comes down to the type of the meeting you had. If it is a department site meeting, then you could have a separate site dedicated to meeting stuff. Or, if this was a project meeting, then the web parts discussed below would reside on a dedicated Whatever the type of site it is, it can utilize any of the options listed below.Another cool way to organize project meeting artifacts is via Document Sets. Document Set is a special type of content type, which combines the beauty of folders and metadata. I have written a detailed post on document sets just recently. Essentially, each document set (folder) will represent a meeting and have corresponding metadata associated with it (project meeting information like date, attendees, location, etc.). Inside of each folder (document set) – you will store meeting documents. This option might take little bit more time for you to set up than the other two but allows for a very structured and elegant way to organize project meeting informatio

  Features

This release includes a number of new features and improvements for users to manage meetings, including:

• Configurable date formats – allowing users to easily display dates according to the norms in their region
• Granular export to PDF – select only the portions of your meeting you want to export
• Selectively carry over open agenda items for recurring meetings
• Ability to mark agenda items as complete and attendees as late
• Tweaks and improvements to Meeting agenda pages, such as the ability to collapse the meeting summary when not in use