A Meeting Workspace is a Web site for centralizing all the information and materials for one or more meetings.

In this article

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• About Meeting Workspaces

• Parts of a Meeting Workspace site

• Attendees, users, and site groups in the Meeting Workspace site

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About Meeting Workspaces

A Meeting Workspace site is a Web site that is a repository for all the information and materials needed for one or more meetings. You can set up a Meeting Workspace site when you create a meeting invitation in Microsoft Office Outlook. The subject, the attendee names, the date, the time, and the location from the meeting request are added to the Meeting Workspace site automatically by Outlook. If you change this information at a later time, Outlook automatically updates the Meeting Workspace site with the new information.

 Note   If you update the information in the Meeting Workspace site instead, you need to update that information in the meeting request in Outlook manually.

If you set up a Meeting Workspace site by using Outlook with a Microsoft Exchange account, a link to the site is automatically added to the body of your meeting request. The invitees can click the link to see and work with the agenda, the documents, and other meeting-related information in the Meeting Workspace site. During the meeting, you can view the Meeting Workspace site and update it with information such as the names of the attendees, the decisions that were made, the action items or tasks that were assigned to the attendees, and publish the meeting minutes. These features help you create a complete record of the meeting for future reference.

You can create a Meeting Workspace site from a variety of locations if Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and a parent SharePoint site are available. The new Meeting Workspace site is created as a sub site of the parent SharePoint site. Some examples of locations to create a Meeting Workspace site are a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0-compatible calendar and scheduling program, such as Outlook, a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site on an intranet, and an external site that hosts Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 or higher. You can also create a Meeting Workspace site by using an existing Meeting Workspace site, but in this case, the new site cannot be a sub site of the existing Meeting Workspace site.

Both Outlook and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 can help you set up a Meeting Workspace site for more than one meeting, such as for a recurring meeting or for multiple related meetings that are all linked to the same Meeting Workspace site. You can also assign a delegate to set up the Meeting Workspace site for you.

 Note   If you use an e-mail program other than Outlook, see its documentation for more information, or contact your system administrator.

You can invite anyone with a valid e-mail address in the same trusted domain as yourself to Meeting Workspace sites that are created in the trusted domain. Meeting Workspace sites that are created on external sites can be accessed by anyone who has a valid e-mail address.

If you use an instant messaging program that is compatible with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, such as Microsoft Windows Live Messenger, or the Microsoft Office Communicator, you can use that program from the Attendees list in the Meeting Workspace site to communicate with other attendees. You can ask an attendee who is online, to visit the Meeting Workspace site so that you can work together.

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Parts of a Meeting Workspace site

A Meeting Workspace site is made up of one or more pages that contain pieces of information called Web Parts. Examples of Web Parts are meeting details and lists of information that are common to planning, conducting, or following up on a meeting. Typical titles for lists include Objectives, Agenda, Attendees, Decisions, and Tasks. In addition to lists, you can add a document library and a picture library where invitees can store materials related to the meeting. The lists and libraries that display by default on the home page depend on the template that you choose when you create the Meeting Workspace site.

If the Meeting Workspace site does not contain all the information that you require, you can customize it to suit your needs. Help for the Meeting Workspace site is available on the site and in Windows SharePoint Services Help.

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Attendees, users, and site groups in the Meeting Workspace site

Although Outlook updates the Attendees list in a Meeting Workspace site, it does not automatically assign permissions to the attendees to access the Meeting Workspace site. Whether rights are granted automatically or not depends on the type of your Meeting Workspace site.

If you create a new Meeting Workspace site, and send a meeting request with a link to the site, the attendees are automatically assigned to the Contributor site group and are added to the site as users with rights to read and write to the Meeting Workspace site. As the meeting organizer, you are assigned to the Administrator site group. If there is a problem with granting rights to an attendee automatically, you will get a message with instructions on where in the Meeting Workspace site you can add the attendee as a user.

If you link to an existing Meeting Workspace site after you send the meeting request, all the attendees will have access rights to the site automatically if either of the following is true:

• The Meeting Workspace site was created originally with unique permissions that are different from the parent Web site.
• The Meeting Workspace site inherited its permission settings from the parent SharePoint site and the attendees have access rights to the parent site.

For more information, see Help in the Meeting Workspace site.

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