Note: This post is relevant to both SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010.

One of the features that SharePoint has had for a while now is the Meeting Workspace site template. It’s a template to help co-ordinate content and activities relating to meetings. Used well, it can be a great time-saver and/or help improve the management of and outcomes from meetings. But it does have its gotchas and isn’t suitable for all types of meetings. This post is an overview of when and how to use SharePoint for managing meetings, including Outlook integration.

There are two methods for using SharePoint to manage meetings:

Team Site with a Calendar and Document Library

The most basic way of using SharePoint to organise meetings: within a team site. It could be a simple document library (e.g. called Meeting Docs) within a general team site, or it could be a dedicated sub-site such as the image above, including a calendar and a library per type of meeting. Add a column to the document library called ‘Meeting Date’ and when you upload documents, you can enter the meeting date for future reference. You an also use it to create views based on meeting date if you want to make it easy for people to locate what documents relate to a given meeting.

The calendar is really an optional nice-to-have. Most people would create the meeting invite within their mailbox and send it out to all attendees. It’s then automatically added to individual calendars for everyone who accepts the meeting invite.  Creating the appointment in a calendar on the SharePoint site just offers another visual prompt, outside a person’s mailbox. But it is a separate manual process (unless you give the site a mailbox and do some jiggery-pokery to make the calendar list an attendee…)

Meeting Workspace

The Meeting Workspace is a special site template designed specifically for meetings. There are 5 variations of the template:

• Basic Meeting Workspace
• Blank Meeting Workspace
• Decision Meeting Workspace
• Social Meeting Workspace
• Multipage Meeting Workspace

The Basic Meeting Workspace contains a single page (per meeting) and 4 web parts (and corresponding lists or libraries): Objectives, Attendees, Agenda and Document Library. The Blank Meeting Workspace contains a single page and nothing – the clue is in the title.  The Decision Meeting Workspace is like the Basic one but with extras: Objectives, Decisions and Tasks.  The Social Meeting Workspace contains multiple pages. The home page contains Attendees, Directions, and Things to Bring plus a picture. There is a page for discussions (it contains a Discussion Board) and a page for Photos (Picture library) ‘cos meetings aren’t social without photos  The Multipage Meeting Workspace lets you create multiple pages for the meeting and starts with 3 to begin. The home page contains Objectives, Attendees and Agenda. The other two are blank and ready to use (and rename from Page 1 and Page 2).

Regardless of the template you pick, a meeting workspace can be recurring – contains multiple meetings within the single workspace; or individual – one workspace per meeting.

Recurring Meeting Workspace

You can create a meeting workspace with a recurring schedule. A single site is created but with special code behind it to generate an instance of the site per meeting date, each one listed in the sidebar on the left of the page. The recurrences can either be created automatically using a recurrence schedule or manually added to the series. But you can not mix and match. It is either a set schedule or a manual series.

Automatic recurrences

When you create the meeting, you specify a recurrence schedule just as you would with a normal meeting. You can create the meeting from within a calendar list in SharePoint or an Outlook calendar. But you must specify to create a meeting workspace. The image above shows the option within SharePoint and a recurrence schedule for the meeting. Outlook integration is discussed later in this post.  You can make changes to an individual item within a recurring series but it must be done within the appointment item.  Additions must be added within the series (i.e. the recurrence schedule or item series).  Do not delete a recurrence unless you are absolutely certain it will no longer be required. It is fiendishly difficult to get it inserted back into the series.

Manual recurrences

Manual recurrences are created by simply adding a meeting to an existing meeting workspace instead of creating a new one. You can only add meetings to a meeting workspace that does NOT have an automatic recurrence schedule. Use this approach if your recurrence schedule is unpredictable.

Individual Meeting Workspace

An individual meeting workspace is a single site for a single meeting. Each time you create a new event in the Calendar list (or within an Outlook calendar), you choose to create a new meeting workspace site. With an individual meeting workspace, you do not get a sidebar down the left site of the page unless you select the Multiple Pages template.

Multipage Meeting Workspace

The Multiple Pages template enables you to have multiple different pages within a single meeting (the Social Meeting Workspace is also a multipage site). In the past I have often used this to provide a dedicated page for meeting organisers, where they can place their contacts, to-do lists and all the stuff that needs to happen for the meeting to take place but is of no interest to the attendees. The content can be audience-targeted so that only the organisers can see it.

In SharePoint 2007, pages were displayed as sub-tabs along the top of the page. They are now listed as navigation in the sidebar (same place as where recurring meetings are listed). This is much more consistent compared to other site templates. But it has its flaws. The ‘Pages’ link takes you to a backstage area that doesn’t actually display any pages.

The image above shows what happens when you click on Pages. You don’t see pages, you get to view All Site Content. That area can be confusing for users at the best of times. If you’re going to call it Pages it would be helpful if it at least displayed a list of the pages… or better still, change it to Home and point it to the default home page. But you can’t modify the link. Add it to the list of usability goofs Microsoft has made with SharePoint 2010.

Outlook Integration

As well as creating meeting workspaces within SharePoint, you can also create them within Outlook. This has a number of benefits:

• The site URL is embedded in the Outlook appointment, making it easy for attendees to navigate to the site (and eliminates the ‘I couldn’t find the document…’ excuse)
• Everyone who is added as an attendee is automatically added to the site permissions as a contributor, so that they can upload and edit documents.

And another change has occurred between the 2007 and 2010 versions, this time within Outlook.

In Outlook 2007, when creating a new appointment in your calendar, if you clicked Invite Attendees you see a link within the ribbon (the new menu structure in Office 2007) to create a Meeting Workspace. As shown in the image below:

In Outlook 2010, the Meeting Workspace link is no longer enabled by default. And when it is enabled, it is a tiny icon up in the Quick Launch tray at the top of the page. To display it, you must first click the little arrow at the far right of the Quick Launch tray (both are circled in red in the image below) to open a dialogue box where you can choose what icons appear, including the Meeting Workspace icon.

But other than that, the functionality is the same. When you click the Meeting Workspace icon, a task pane appears on the left where you can configure options to create a Meeting Workspace, including location and template. The location list is populated with the 5 last visited sites. It may be empty the first time you use the feature and you will need to paste in the URL to a site. But after that, it will remember settings.  People who are added to the To list will be added to the Members group of the site, with Contribute permissions (can add/edit/delete documents by default). The subject link will be used as the site title.  When you click Create, the site is provisioned and link is embedded in the body of the appointment, as shown in the image above.

A couple of tips: Enter the attendee list and subject line in the appointment before you create the meeting workspace. And keep the subject line short or you will end up with a very ugly URL. Gotchas to be aware of – recurring meetings in Outlook that are linked to a SharePoint Meeting Workspace site. I’ve seen a few cases of orphaned meeting workspaces when a recurrence is cancelled in Outlook and then rearranged.

And there you have it. SharePoint can be a very useful tool for organising meetings. But it can also be over-engineered. Only use meeting workspaces when the need justifies them. In many cases, a simple document library is all that is required, with the benefit of metadata to tag and find documents. A simple rule of thumb – think twice about using meeting workspaces for meetings that occur more frequently than quarterly…

SharePoint has always had some form of metadata capabilities. However the latest version includes the first attempt at managing metadata. This post is a brief introduction and overview.

First a quick (and very basic) primer on what is metadata. It is simply data about data – the stuff that describes a document (or any digital artefact). The title, author and date modified are all metadata properties. You can define your own properties such as category (what’s it about) or status (public, confidential). Metadata typically comes in two forms: a hierarchy of terms known as a taxonomy or a mesh of terms known as a folksonomy. A taxonomy is good for controlled classification and organising related terms – for example, a list of departments and teams within departments to identify ownership of documents. A folksonomy is good for flexible classification – letting people choose their own tags to describe the contents of a document. Folksonomies can lack the consistency of formal hierarchies but enable a wider variety of unexpected terms to be used.

Keeping the definitions simple, metadata serves two purposes: 1. Managing content – such as identifying when documents have expired and moving them to an archive or reviewing all confidential items; 2. Finding content – ‘Show me all posts written about SharePoint’ for example. If metadata doesn’t make content easier to manage and/or easier to find, question why you need it.

SharePoint 2010 works with four different types of metadata:

The first two are also available in all previous versions and editions of SharePoint. The second two are new features in SharePoint 2010 (and only available in the Server editions, they are not included with the SharePoint Foundation Service that is included with Windows Server )

Document Properties

…are actually nothing to do with SharePoint. They are managed and stored within documents themselves. Some properties are common to most file formats: title, author, date created, date modified and document size. Others are unique to different types of content, such as duration time for a media or audio file. Whilst the properties are part of the document, SharePoint can make use of them. Properties within Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) will be automatically promoted into SharePoint columns and indexed. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for other file formats such as PDFs.

For most applications, you can access and view/edit the properties from the File menu. A common search gotcha is creating documents from existing files instead of blank templates. Certain properties, such as title and author, are automatically populated when a document is first saved from a template. But these properties do not automatically update if someone uses an existing document and saves it under a new name. It means title and author can have little relevance to the actual content of the document.

List/library Properties

…go by many names, columns being the one used in the SharePoint user interface (UI). Columns are used in SharePoint lists and libraries to store all the different properties used to describe a document, including any extracted from the document itself. SharePoint provides a range of pre-configured columns. Or you can create your own using the many different types of column available. You can even create calculated columns, such as setting an expiry or review date 12 months after the date last modified. Because the properties are managed within SharePoint, they can be applied to any digital item stored in SharePoint.

The image above shows a SharePoint library containing a PDF file, a Word document and a Windows Media file. Using SharePoint columns, the same properties can be applied to all types of files. The added feature you get with Office is that you can access the SharePoint properties from within Office as well as the browser, as shown in the image below:

Managed Metadata

…is a new feature in SharePoint 2010. It runs as a service just like search, user profiles and other features that benefit from being managed centrally. The Managed Metadata Service (MMS) enables you to create hierarchical term sets that people can then pick from to classify documents.

The image above shows three term sets under the group heading Organisation – Department, Month and Product, with the term set for ‘Product’ expanded. ‘SharePoint’ is selected and on the right-side of the image, you can see the default value and other labels that people might try to use. If anyone were to enter ‘Tahoe’ or ‘SP2010′, it will automatically update to display the default value of ‘SharePoint’. You can also add language-specific variations. If you decide to change the default value, all items currently classified with that term will be automatically updated. This is very different behaviour to normal list/library columns within SharePoint – if you change the settings for a normal column, all existing items will keep their original properties until someone manually updates them.

Managed metadata is also used by the search service, which uses the term sets to help refine search results

The image above shows search results with the ability to refine by Department and Product – these are both based on the corresponding term sets in the Managed Metadata Service.

When it comes to applying managed metadata, it’s back to the SharePoint lists and libraries. Two new types of column are available:

• Enterprise keywords column
• Managed metadata column

Enterprise Keywords column

The Enterprise keywords column is enabled in the list/library settings:

Note: you can also choose whether or not properties populated using this column will appear as part of a user’s social tag cloud (more on that later). The Enterprise Keywords column allows users to enter any words to classify a document or item. Autocomplete will suggest available metadata properties and tags (social tagging is coming up shortly) and a user can enter as many values as they want.

In the image above, entering the letters ‘sh’ results in two suggestions. The first is from the Product term set. The second is a tag that someone else has used. All unmanaged tags are added to a single term set called ‘Keywords’. I could choose one of those suggestions or enter a new tag that will then be added to the Keywords.

Managed Metadata column

When you create a column in SharePoint 2010 you can choose a new type – Managed metadata. You’ll get a warning that it is not compatible with previous versions of Office. For the column settings, you can point it to any term set and users will then be able to pick from that list.

Social Tagging

In reality, this is part of the managed metadata service (MMS). Microsoft documents and SharePoint user tend to use the phrase ‘keywords’ for both the formal hierarchical term sets and the informal tags which can be confusing.

Social tagging enables anyone to classify an item using any word. The first time it is used it is added to a list of keywords in the MMS. After that, it will be suggested whenever someone starts to type a word beginning with the same letters. Just about anything can be tagged in SharePoint including sites and pages as well as items in lists and libraries.

The image above shows the default header for all sites and pages in SharePoint 2010. You can use the simple ‘I Like It’ tag or you can click ‘Tags & Notes’ and enter your own tags as well as notes about the page. These tags are organised in a tag cloud on the user’s Profile page which enables everyone to see what other people have been tagging. You can even tag external web sites.

The image above shows a (very small) tag cloud on The Administrator’s profile page.

To use social tagging in lists and libraries, you have to enable the Enterprise Keywords column in the list/library settings (already mentioned earlier in this post). You have the option to choose whether or not the column will be used to populate social tag clouds.

Social tags are managed in the same place as your hierarchical term sets – the Managed Metadata service. They are organised as a flat list under a single System term set called ‘Keywords’. The benefit of having both hierarchical term sets and informal tag sets managed together is that you can promote tags into your hierarchical term sets if it becomes evident people are using different words to the ones you thought they would use.

In the image above, I have clicked on Customer Support and have the option to move or delete the keyword. If I select Move, I can then pick a location in one of my hierarchical term sets (such as Department). Once moved, you can also merge terms together, for example if Customer Support were to replace Customer Services.

Managed Metadata Issues

There are a couple of caveats to be aware of currently with managed metadata – both the hierarchical term sets and social tagging (keywords). They only work within the browser and Office 2010. If you are using an older version of Office, including 2007 regardless of using the new file formats, you will not be able to edit these properties from within Office. Secondly, they do not work in Datasheet view in the browser which means there is no easy way to bulk classify items, you have to edit them individually. This is a huge pain if you are migrating documents from other sources including older SharePoint sites. Workarounds are limited. You can set the default value but need to be organised with how you import your documents or consider using 3rd party tools. Whilst the Managed Metadata and Enterprise Keywords columns appear within the SharePoint list or library, their contents are managed in a separate database. The downside is some loss of functionality within Office and the SharePoint list/library compared to normal column types. The benefit is being able to automatically update all document properties centrally and being able to use the term sets as search refiners/filters.

The other gotcha is the term set hierarchy and search results. If you scroll back up and look at the Search Results image, in the sidebar on the left you will see my two term sets – Department and Products, each listing terms beneath them. Click on these terms and you can refine search results to display only content tagged with these terms. So far, so great. However, notice that there is no hierarchy beneath the term set.  My term set Products has first-level terms SharePoint (and others not showing, SQL and Office). The term SharePoint has second-level terms including Apps and Content. But this hierarchy is lost in the search refiners, all terms in the Term Set are displayed as one level. So if you are using managed metadata primarily to help improve search results, keep your hierarchy as flat as possible, ideally just Term Set – Terms.

[Update 15th Nov 2010] This post has also been published on EndUserSharePoint – http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2010/11/15/sharepoint-managed-metadata-overview/

[Update 1st Sep 2011] Related blog post publishing highlighting taxonomy limits – http://www.sharepointsharon.com/2011/09/sharepoint-2010-taxonomy-limits/

Related blog posts

• SharePoint 2010 and Taxonomy Limits
• Embedding Office documents in SharePoint
• Classifying content in SharePoint
• Taxonomy in MOSS
• Rethinking the file plan

The presentation below contains a walkthrough the basics of what are content types in SharePoint 2010 and what’s new. Enjoy!

Additional notes…

How to set-up Content Type Syndication Hubs

• Create a site collection to host the hub. (I create a standard one for all admin-y stuff – http://servername/sites/admin/
• At the root of the site collection, go into Site Settings | Site Collection Features and activate ‘Content Type Syndication Hub’
• Go to Central Admin | Manage Service Applications
• Select the Managed Metadata Service (not the connection and don’t click the URL, select by clicking to the side of it)
• Click on Properties in the ribbon and enter the URL for the syndication hub (http://servername/sites/admin/ and click OK
• Select the Managed Metadata Service Connector
• Click on Properties in the ribbon and check the box next to ‘Consumes content types from the…. (should show the URL)
• To see images showing the above steps, visit Setting up Content Type Syndication Hubs – Furuknap’s blog, Dec 09

Microsoft has released the Productivity Hub – a SharePoint Server 2007 site collection available for download that includes training materials for end-users. Ready to be installed on any internal SharePoint Server 2007 deployment, the Productivity Hub includes:

• SharePoint site collection pre-loaded with content – documents videos etc. – for end user productivity training
• A blog offering tips and tricks that can be used ‘as is’ or customised by training staff
• ‘Train the trainer – IT/Management section for deploying the site collection and developing a coaching programme

Interesting concept – I’ll be adding it to my SharePoint 2007 demo for evaluation and will report back here.

Hat tip to Mark Harrison for posting.

Alerts are a feature within SharePoint to automatically notify you about new and/or updated information. Instead of having to keep checking to find out if content has changed, SharePoint will tell you when it happens.

You can create alerts on any list, library or even the results of a search query. For lists and libraries, the Alert option can be found under Actions:

For search results, it depends on how your results page has been configured. But the default settings all include the Alert link:

When creating a new alert, you choose what criteria will trigger an alert and how often you want to receive the alerts.

Check your email address is correct (the alert will automatically be set-up for the user you are logged in as – better use your own account for this! – and you’re done. Alerts will start to arrive in your inbox… provided your SharePoint environment has been configured to send email alerts. But that’s down to the IT department to sort out.

To manage all your alerts, there is an option within Outlook 2007*. Within Outlook, go to Tools Rules and Alerts, and click on the Manage Alerts tab. There you will see all your alerts within SharePoint and can delete any you no longer want to receive.

*Haven’t got Outlook 2003 running to check if it’s there too. In SharePoint Server 2003, alerts were managed differently.

Related blog post: SharePoint and RSS versus Alerts

Delicious tags: RSS Alerts