New SharePoint Meeting Manager with template-based Meeting Minutes announced by Layer2

Sept. 23, 2009 - PRLog -- Keeping meetings organized and moving forward with up to date information is an often difficult task.  Create a SharePoint Meeting Workspace with MOSS 2007 or Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Outlook for your meetings, to organize and keep everyone informed with ease, providing a uniform approach with better meetings and faster decisions. SharePoint out-of-the-box includes basic meeting life-cycle management features. Typically customer demands however go far beyond this. The SharePoint Meeting Manager adds this often required features very flexible, to configure customer specific solutions, including meeting minutes.

Complete meeting life-cycle covered with SharePoint Meeting Manager

The improved SharePoint Meeting Workspace template covers the complete meeting life-cycle before, during and after a meeting.

Planning for the meeting includes e.g. setting the meeting time and place using Outlook and / or SharePoint consistently, inviting attendees, defining required and optional attendees, define the attendee’s role (Organizer, Attendee, Minute Taker), rescheduling notifications, tracking attendee responses, defining the agenda, collecting and providing materials that will be required during the meeting - centrally managed with versioning, notifications and workflow.

The SharePoint Meeting Manager helps users in facilitating the meeting, e.g. verifying attendance, following the agenda, presenting materials, recording decisions, tracking action items that are identified.

Post-meeting follow-ups are also included, e.g. to assure compliance by setting some materials to read-only, creating and publishing post-meeting materials such as template-based meeting minutes with custom fields, design and function, managing meeting minutes approval workflow and action items workflow.

SharePoint Meeting Manager creates meeting minutes automatically

The new feature comes not only with role-based permissions, additional libraries, lists and fields, a centrally managed meeting materials library, improved notifications consistently across SharePoint and Outlook, improved meeting compliance and action items workflows. It additionally provides customizable meeting minutes templates, based on WordML - an XML-like language that can be edited simply using Microsoft Word.

Download and evaluate SharePoint Meeting Manager today

The SharePoint Meeting Manager is a real time saver and a must-have for everyone that often has to manage meetings in Microsoft SharePoint and Outlook. The feature comes with a robust installer to allow it to be easily deployed within any SharePoint environment, including farms. It currently is available for SharePoint starting with WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007. You can download it directly on the vendor’s product pages at www.layer2.de/en/products.

FREE to use for SharePoint User Groups (SPUG)

All components offered by Layer2 are completely FREE to use within a registered SharePoint User Group web site (back-link and logo required).

Cost-free partner program for implementers and affiliates

A cost-free partner program was launched to support companies that are interested to sell and implement Layer2 products around the world. Registered affiliates can market Layer2 products by placing links on their web sites to the relevant product pages of the Layer2 web shop on www.share-it.com. They will receive a 20% commission for each sale of these products via their web site. Additionally implementers receive qualified leads to make use of Layer2 solutions in their own projects.
Please register and join today!

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About Layer2:
Layer 2 GmbH is a specialist for creating custom components and solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Based in Germany, Layer2 offers products and solutions that add additional features to portals based on Microsoft SharePoint technology, e.g. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 or the free Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 / 4.0 (WSS). The products – SharePoint web parts, features and solutions - are completely based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and especially designed to run on top of SharePoint technology and to integrate fluently into the SharePoint user interface. The solutions are sold directly to end-customers or distributed via a worldwide fast growing partner network of resellers and implementers.