It’s not easy being the Marketing Director for a highly successful advertising agency, but for Zana it’s a highly rewarding and satisfying job. In such a fast-paced industry, products and services must be delivered accurately and on time. Successful team collaboration and effective team meetings are crucial to on-time delivery. Often, the effectiveness of the initial meeting determines the success of the entire project. All too often, an important client will call Zana with crucial last-minute requests and updates.

It’s vital that each team meeting be productive, succinct and effective. With such a need for real-time teamwork, how does Zana lead productive meetings? Let’s look in on a typical scenario and find out.

Keep your team notes together in one place: a Meeting Workspace

Using Outlook 2003, Zana schedules a meeting with her team to brainstorm ideas about a new project. From within the meeting request, she creates a Meeting Workspace. This is a Windows Sharepoint Services Web site for sharing meeting information that works with Outlook 2003. The attendee list is created from the meeting request, and the workspace information is sent to participants with the meeting request.

In the Meeting Workspace, Zana can add agenda items and post supporting documents and project information. She also sets up a OneNote section file for the team to use for collaborative brainstorming. The centralized Meeting Workspace gives her team members access to the same information and makes sharing notes easy.

Prior to the meeting, each team member can review pertinent project information, such as the agenda, on the Meeting Workspace. They can also add additional information or agenda items if they want.

Capturing the brilliant ideas of the moment in OneNote

At the meeting, Zana opens OneNote and the section she has set up on the Meeting Workspace. She then sets up a shared OneNote session and sends an invitation to all of her team members so they can participate.

One of the main goals of the meeting is to brainstorm ad ideas for a client, so Zana needs to capture everyone’s creativity. Using OneNote, team members can draw, diagram, write, or type their ad ideas—all in real time. Zana leads and records the discussion using OneNote’s audio recording feature. Key decisions and concepts are marked with Note flags to make them easy to organize and retrieve. When the team completes their brainstorming session, OneNote notes and audio recording are stored in the Meeting Workspace.

After the meeting, team members work from the Meeting Workspace to retrieve the latest updates and information from the meeting, rather than relying on their already crowded Inboxes.

Using OneNote to brainstorm at a meeting produced a collected body of ideas, and everyone on the team has access to it. Zana's team can move forward on their goals rapidly, knowing that everyone is on the same page.

Download or order a free, trial version of OneNote 2003

Learn more about Meeting Workspaces