SharePoint 2010 for Project Management, 2nd Edition

Using Meeting Workspaces

How often do you have meetings for your project? Don’t you love meetings—especially the meeting about planning for the next meeting? NOT! Let’s step through the typical meeting process, looking at the normal meeting lifecycle, and determining how closely it resembles meetings that you conduct or attend in your world:

1. A meeting invitation is sent via email to 10 meeting participants with 5 project documents attached.

2. The meeting takes place. During the meeting, we discover that people did not read the documents before the meeting; instead, they read them in the meeting.

3. At the end of the meeting, action items are listed and assigned.

4. A few days later, email messages start to fly back and forth with various attached documents to update the assigned action items. These messages are sent to all participants in the meeting, even if most of them have no involvement with the specific action item.

5. In addition, we discover that no one can agree as to which action items were assigned to which attendees.

What’s wrong with this picture? We live it every single day. If only you didn’t have to get tons of email messages with attachments that have nothing to do with you…think about how much storage is wasted with all these files being sent back and forth. Even worse, how is document history tracked? What if the customer wants a copy of the status report that was edited two days after the status meeting? Can it be retrieved easily? Who has that version? Where is it stored?

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