5.4 Meetings

5.4.1 Meetings - application

5.4.2 Creating a meeting

5.4.3 Changing details of a meeting

5.4.4 List of participants

5.4.5 Respond to a meeting invitation

5.4.6 Participate in a meeting

5.4.7 Your meetings calendar

5.4.1 Meetings - application

Meetings created in Business Collaborator are objects used to plan and co-ordinate meetings in any format, including electronic, teleconference or face-to-face. A meeting is displayed as:

Figure 5.4-1: A Meeting as listed in a folder view.

A Business Collaborator meeting

• allows you to inform meeting participants of the details of a specific meeting -- date, time, location etc.
• can be used as a folder for posting an agenda, providing reference documents in advance, sharing presentations or distributing minutes of the meeting after it has taken place
• can initiate virtual synchronous cooperation (e.g. via a conferencing application over the Internet) by starting the respective programs and establishing connections. (Note that the conferencing application must be installed on all the machines participating in the conference.)

In the folder view where the meeting was created, all members of the workspace or shared folder see the meeting object and its contents -- even if they have not been invited to participate. For the invited participants, the meeting also appears in their personal meetings calendar - see section 5.4.7. The contents of a meetings calendar are shown in Figure 5.4-2.

Figure 5.4-2: A meetings calendar.

5.4.2 Creating a meeting

To add a new meeting to a workspace or shared folder, click  Add  |   Meeting  . This brings up a form (as shown in Figure 5.4-3) where you can enter the details of your meeting:

• Date & time
• Location -- for a face-to-face meeting, you can specify a location. For a virtual meeting, enter the network and the application using which you plan to contact your colleagues. For some conferencing programs, you must also specify an IP address for Business Collaborator to be able to start the application.
• Participants -- can be selected from the list of the workspace or shared folder members. Additional participants can be entered as email addresses.
• Notes -- miscellaneous information about the meeting.

Figure 5.4-3: Initiating a meeting.

The invitation to a meeting is not also an invitation to the folder. The email address that you enter to specify an external participant is used only within the meeting object. Therefore external participants (i. e. participants who are not members of the folder that the meeting object belongs to) do not automatically have access to the information contained in the meeting object. If you wish to enable access for them, you should

• create the meeting object without letting Business Collaborator send an invitation email to the participants automatically
• modify the access rights to permit anonymous access to the meeting object and its contents (see section 4.6.6.)
• send an email to the participants to tell them how to access the meeting object. (This can be done from the "Members page" for the meeting page, using the list of participants as recipients in the same way that you can send an email to all members of a workspace (see section 4.2.4).

As invited participants respond to the invitation to participate in the meeting, the list of confirmed and declined invitations will be updated for the meeting object.

5.4.3 Changing details of a meeting

If you wish to modify the details of the meeting, e.g. its time or location, click on the appropriate action for the meeting object to bring up the form with the current details of the meeting, e.g.  |  Change Date and Time  or  |  Change Location  . You can modify these as required. Business Collaborator can help you to inform all invited participants by email about important modifications to these details. When you modify the details of the meeting, you also have the opportunity to reissue an invitation to the participants.

The meeting’s info page displays meeting-specific information in addition to the information present on standard info pages. Under 'Details of [Name of the meeting]' you will be able to see who has been invited and who has already confirmed or declined to participate.

5.4.4 List of participants

Just as a workspace or shared folder has its list of members, a meeting object has its list of participants. Clicking will display the participants list. Like the membership page of a workspace or shared folder, this page lists the user names or email addresses that have been entered as participants of the meeting. As a reminder that all members of the workspace or shared folder can access the meeting object and its contents, Business Collaborator automatically adds the Business Collaborator group "Members of [Name of the place where the meeting object is located]" to this list.

Warning

You should not remove this Business Collaborator group from the list of participants.

Additional participants can be added to an existing meeting in the following way:

Click  View/Change  |   Change Participants  in the info page of the meeting object to bring up a form that lets you invite to the meeting

• members of the folder and
• others, represented by their email address -- irrespective of their membership of the folder or their 'registered user'-status.

You can remove members from, and send emails to, the list of participants in the usual way on the "Members page ":

 Selected  |  Remove   to remove selected participants from the list of participants;

 Selected  |  Email  to send an email to selected participants;

 View/Change  |  To AddrBook  for the entire list to add all current participants of the meeting to your address book as the Business Collaborator group ' Members of [Name of the meeting]';

 Selected  |  To AddrBook   for selected participants to add the participants you have chosen as individual entries to your address book.

5.4.5 Respond to a meeting invitation

If you are invited to participate in a meeting, you should either confirm your attendance or decline the invitation. You can do this directly from the meeting itself using  View/Change  |  Confirm  or  View/Change  |  Decline  , or from your meetings calendar (see section 5.4.7).

5.4.6 Participate in a meeting

To set up a virtual (electronic) meeting at the agreed time, click  View/Change  |  Join  in the meeting view or for the meeting object.

Business Collaborator then sends a file to your system with the correct MIME type to

• start the conferencing application specified in the meeting object and
• connect it automatically to the correct addresses,

if your computer system, and in particular the browser, are configured appropriately. (Consult the manual or the electronic help for your browser and for the conferencing application.)

5.4.7 Your meetings calendar

Your meetings object is one of your personal objects and presents you with an overview of all the meetings to which you have been invited on a Business Collaborator server. Click to display your calendar of Business Collaborator meetings. It shows you all meetings to which you have been invited, not only those in the current folder.

Business Collaborator can show you one of four time windows on your meetings calendar:

• all Business Collaborator meetings
• all future Business Collaborator meetings
• Business Collaborator meetings in the current month
• Business Collaborator meetings in the current year.

Whether or not you have confirmed your attendance at each meeting is indicated for each meeting in your meetings calendar:

" Confirmed" - confirmed your participation

"Not replied" - not yet replied

"Declined" - declined the invitation.

You can confirm or decline your participation in several meetings from your meetings calendar by selecting the meetings which you will attend and clicking  Selected  |  Confirm  then selecting those for which you wish to decline the invitation and clicking  Selected  |  Decline  . Your calendar and the details of the respective meeting object will be updated accordingly.

You can remind the invited participants who have not yet confirmed or declined their attendance using:  View/Change  |  Send Reminder  from the Meetings view.

You can also remove meetings in which you are not interested from your meetings calendar by selecting them and clicking  Selected  |  Remove   . This action affects only your calendar; the meeting object itself remains unchanged. (Note that this operation cannot be undone.)