Meeting Solution for SharePoint Online

There are two types of Meeting Solution available in SharePoint Online, to help manage committees and gather together calendars and documents:

Basic Meeting Site

This provides the functionality for a meeting with documents. It has a pre-configured Home page with several webparts:

• Text which can be customised with your meeting details
• News where your announcements can be added
• Events where your next meeting will be displayed
• Meeting Calendar to hold your meeting dates
• Meeting Documents library with Next Meeting Documents and Last Meeting Documents views, where content is moved automatically between the two based on the current date

Committee Meeting Site

This provides functionality for meetings, with documentation and security levels to manage who can access what content. It has a pre-configured Home page with several webparts:

• Text which can be customised with your meeting details
• News where your announcements can be added
• Events where your next meeting will be displayed
• Meeting Calendar to hold your meeting dates
• Meeting Documents library with Next Meeting Documents and Last Meeting Documents views, where content can be moved between the two automatically using Flow
• Document Library of Reserved and Unreserved documents, which can be grouped by choices inline

More Information

Further details on both site types, including how to request them, and set them up, are available on the Meeting Solution Self Support site.

Requesting a Meeting Site

You can request either a Basic Meeting site or a Committee Meeting site via IT Self-Service using the same service request for a new SharePoint Online site.

You will be asked for the "Type of Site" and you can choose either Basic Meeting site or Committee Meeting site from the drop-down:

"Type of site" drop down, allowing you choose either a Basic Meeting site or Committee Meeting site

Using MS Teams to manage Committees 

Some departments and colleges have found that their committee administration can be met via MS Teams if their requirements are straightforward.

MS Teams provides a simple, easy to set up method of committee management. If you do not require granular permissions within your committees then this method could be considered. 

Further details on how you can do this, based on the experiences of two different colleges, can be found in this Quick Reference Guide - Using MS Teams to Manage Committees.