I have always found meeting minutes in a document library hard to manage, not easy to find information from the meeting, and a hassle to have to open each document searching for a specific piece of info.
Problem:
Meeting Minutes in Document Library Challenges:
- Have to open each meeting minute document to search for the right meeting with the right information.
- Meeting minutes file names just have the date and unless I have a calendar in front of me, difficult to easily recall what day I looking for.
- Can't look for meetings minutes regarding specific topics.
- Can't search across meeting minutes to find action items assigned to me.
These are just a few of the of the many challenges with meeting minutes in a document library.
You may suggest using the SharePoint Meeting Workspace template. I have found that the concept of having multiple lists to capture agendas, attendees, action items and meeting notes was to much work for those managing a meeting.
Solution:
I was reading a post, that I can't find, that suggested using a Blog for meeting minutes. I gave it a good review to see what the benefits would be. At the company I work for we have implemented about 3 months ago and it has been a huge success.
As read more and thought about all the issues that I have with meeting minutes it made a lot of sense as a good solution to solve many of the problems I outlined above.
A Blog can handle rich text like word.
Benefits and Results:
- A Blog is sequential log of post, like meeting minutes, from newest to oldest.
- Up to 10 meeting minutes can be viewed at a time.
- Can do a simple CTRL F and search for through all post listed.
- Can now categorize meeting minutes and even have multiple categories (I will show how to add that to categories on a Blog, which is not standard.)
- Can view posts in a calendar view and go back month by month looking for the correct meeting minute.
- Can easily send meeting minutes from the Blog.
- Can sign up for an RSS feed to see when meeting minutes are added or updated.
- Can provide comments to a specific meeting minute with out having to edit the meeting minutes.
- Can save draft version of a meeting minute before posting it to the Blog.
A Blog can be added to any site. It will be a subsite, but you can link to it from your main site. Benefit is that the meeting minutes Blog can have the same or separate permissions.
Click on my ExamplePoint link to view a sample meeting minute Blog and how to set one up.