My organization is using meeting workspaces to capture our meeting deliberations. These meeting workspaces feature the usual suspects in regards to lists: Attendees, Agenda, Decisions, Issues, Action Items (aka Tasks). When our meetings are complete, I need to consolidate the information in these lists into a single Word document. I would love to define a workflow that I could initiate upon closure of the meeting that would automatically consolidate my meeting information into a single Word document and distribute the document for review to the attendees. I can build dynamic strings in a workflow, but I can only look up individual items in a list, not paste the entire lists. Any ideas how to build a dynamic string that pulls all of the information in a given list view? Are there more effective ways of consolidating this meeting list data into a single document?
Stump the Panel » End Users and Information Workers
How do I create a consolidated minutes document from meeting workspace lists?
(8 posts)-
Posted 2 months ago #
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Because these meetings will span multiple sites, I'd look at creating a series of CQWP that you can filter by site. You will need a CQWP for each content type so Attendees will have one, Events, etc. Style them and arrange them on a page for the "meeting overview/summary."
Posted 2 months ago # -
Makes sense, Thank you...
Unfortunately, I am working in a WSS environment. To the best of my knowledge, the CQWP web part is not available in WSS environments. Is there an option for the WSS environment?
Curious,
PatPosted 2 months ago # -
Correct, the CQWP is not part of WSS. Do you have SharePoint Designer? If you do, then you can do something similar to what AutoSponge outlined.
But after rereading your post it seems what you want to create a document with all the information collected with the SharePoint meeting template. If I understand it correctly, I would ask why put this in a document when you have a site that has captured all this and could just email out a link to everyone to review the site?
If you must send out the info in a document format, what about making a pdf of the page with all the information on it. I do this for various reports that are simply web parts put together show specific info, that is printed as a pdf and then emailed to list of members.
Peter
Posted 2 months ago # -
It would be a kludge but we can probably dynamically load the bits of the pages we need with AJAX and JavaScript. The same way I'm displaying a calendar's DispForm data, you can layout several of these content zones as long as you can predict exactly where the content will be in the Meeting site, every time.
Posted 2 months ago # -
Thank you all for your insights! Unfortunately, I am obligated to capture the minutes in a discrete file.
I've actually resorted to copying and pasting each list into a Word document. It seems to work fine for the time being, but I'm thinking that there must be a way to automatically import list data into a Word template. Word 2007 is pretty savvy about going the other way and publishing the SharePoint. I'm hoping that there is a way to create a template that once invoked would auto-populate with the site data in accordance with the template data connections...kinda like a mail merge.
I'm not very AJAX or JavaScript savvy, unfortunately...more of an office power user level of expertise I'm afraid :(
In any case, I'll let you know if I am able to create a Word template-based solution.
Thank you again for your assistance!
PatrickPosted 1 month ago # -
There's a difference between "discrete file" and Word. If your requirement is to take the content offline, you could consider saving the SharePoint page as Web page, or exporting to Excel for example.
Posted 4 weeks ago # -
Hi Christophe,
Yes...the requirement is to be able to take the content offline. I could indeed save it as a web archive, text file or export individual lists to Excel. Unfortunately, the web archive or text file approach would confuse much of my user base which opens documents from within applications rather than windows explorer. The Excel export has proven tedious in the past and invariably requires extensive reformatting after words.I have found that it is quite easy to capture meta data from the sharepoint library in which a Word document is hosted, but not very easy to capture data from other lists. I am currently focusing my investigation on Office Business Applications and derivatives of the solution posted at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc185135.aspx. Very much terra incognita for me ;)
Kind regards...
Posted 4 weeks ago #
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