When you're faced with the challenge of managing multiple projects and tasks, team meetings can help you be more productive both as a communicator and as a leader. But efficient, productive team meetings don't happen by accident. Organizing a meeting is a lot like organizing a project: You need the right people and processes in place to make it successful.

Because meetings are instrumental in getting team members on the same page and encouraging decision making, you want to make the most of them. If you're serious about creating a meeting environment in which the participants are well-informed, deliverables are assigned, and progress is communicated, consider using the Meeting Workspaces feature in Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003.

What is a Meeting Workspace?

A Meeting Workspace is a unique type of Web site created using Microsoft Windows® SharePoint™ Services in collaboration with Outlook. You don't actually run the meeting in the workspace, rather you create a workspace to organize and communicate the contents of a meeting. A workspace can contain agendas, meeting notes, relevant documents, and the names and contact information for all participants. A workspace also enables you to store important information in a central location so that you can track deliverables and decisions, keep your own team up to date, and maintain a record of the meeting that everyone involved in the project can refer to.

For details about how Meeting Workspaces can help you to improve communication within the project team, see the Office Online article called About Meeting Workspaces.

Requirements

The Meeting Workspace feature in Outlook requires the following:

• Outlook 2003.
• A Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail account.
• Access rights to a parent Windows SharePoint Services site or a Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server Web site under which the Meeting Workspace will be a subsite.

For more information about these requirements, contact your organization's administrator.

Leading team meetings just got easier

Before you schedule a meeting, consider the following practices for setting it up:

• Determine whether a sit-down meeting is the best way to communicate, deliver, or decide on the information.
• If appropriate, secure a meeting room.
• Establish when to meet and for how long.
• Decide who should participate in the meeting.
• Prepare a detailed meeting agenda, if required.
• Determine in advance what the goals of the meeting are.
• Decide which action items need to be assigned in the meeting.
• Plan for you or one of the other participants to take notes.

When you have assembled this information, create a meeting request in Outlook. For example, to start a meeting request, open the Outlook Calendar, and then click Meeting Request on the New toolbar menu.

Enter the required information (attendees, meeting room, and time) in the meeting request, but before sending it out, click Meeting Workspace to create a shared, centralized site for the project team. In the Meeting Workspace pane on the right, click Create.

Next, add any information or documentation you want your team to have access to through this site, and then send the meeting request. Each recipient of the meeting request will receive an invitation to view the Meeting Workspace you created for this meeting.

For detailed information about creating Meeting Workspaces, see the Office Online article called Keep it together with a Meeting Workspace in the See Also section of this article.

Let Meeting Workspaces help carry the weight

When the meeting is over, the real work usually begins. Use your Meeting Workspace to help you relay the decisions that were made in the meeting and the milestones each team member must meet. For example:

• Create the meeting notes, and upload them to the Meeting Workspace for this meeting.
• Follow up with team members who have action items from the meeting.
• Communicate specific results to the participants.
• Store and share documents on the workspace site so that other team members can access the relevant information.
• Make project announcements.
• Store future meeting summaries.

If necessary, remind the meeting attendees of the Meeting Workspace location.

Summary

Launching a project almost always involves taking on new challenges and training new participants. By using the features in Office to make you more productive in your job, you promote project leadership and set an example that raises the bar for your team.