SharePoint Meetings Management - A Suggestion

SharePoint may well be used to automate taking meeting notes and handling meeting decisions. In no less than 12 articles in the SharePoint Online from Scratch series I suggest how a meeting management system in SharePoint can be built. I start with a simple solution, which I then expand with various enhancements.

Meeting Notes list
I create one list for Meeting Notes, and each meeting is entered as a list item. For this to work I must of course customize the list, and I do that with a content type, which I create in the Content Type Hub. That way the same kind of list design can be used in the whole SharePoint tenancy.

Action Points lists
The aim of a meeting is often to decide what actions should be taken, and I choose to not add these actions to the Meeting Notes list. Instead I create one Action Points list for each meeting. The Action Points lists should of course also be built on a content type.

List templates
The Action Points list, which will be created at each meeting, must be very easy to create.
The responsible person should not have to do anything more than add an app, select a template and write a list name.

Therefore I create an Action Points list template that will show up among the other app templates in that site collection. I also create a template for the Meeting Notes list, and then I upload both templates to more site collections.

Meetings overview and search vertical
Meetings concern many users, so it might be useful to display all meetings in the organization on one central SharePoint page. Such a collection of meetings can be created with the Content Search web part. Another way to make it easy to find meetings is to create a Meetings search vertical in the SharePoint Search Center.

My Tasks
When several people are responsible for the action points decided on a meeting, it is convenient to let each user see his/her tasks in a web part. This can also be done with the Content Search web part, and you can select to either show only the Action Points task or items in all lists built on the same parent content type.

I hope you have found this interesting! You are welcome to take my suggestion as it is or adapt parts of it for your organization.

Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions