Meetings

Everything under Communications & Content → Meetings.

The module exists mainly so that decisions taken in a room do not evaporate when people leave it:

Meeting → Minutes → Action Items

Meetings

Meetings → Meetings

The meetings themselves: a title, a type, the date and time, a room or a link, the organiser, and the attendees.

Creating a meeting records it and lists the people expected.

Creating a meeting is not sending an invitation

This module records meetings. Whether attendees are notified depends on your email configuration, and if that is not set up nothing is sent and nothing warns you.

Do not assume people know about a meeting because it exists here.

Meeting Types

Meetings → Meeting Types

The category a meeting falls into — Board Meeting, Team Standup, One to One, Client Review, Training.

Types make the history searchable: “show me every one-to-one this quarter” is only possible if the meetings were classified when they were created.

Meeting Rooms

Meetings → Meeting Rooms

The physical rooms available, usually with a location and a capacity.

Recording capacity is worth the extra few seconds. It is what stops somebody booking a room for four when twelve people are coming.

Meeting Attendees

Who was invited to each meeting, and whether they attended.

This screen is not in the sidebar

Meeting Attendees has been removed from the navigation menu in this build, along with Meeting Minutes. Both screens still exist and still work.

In normal use you reach attendees from the meeting itself, which is the more natural route. The standalone list is only needed if you want to look across every meeting at once — ask your administrator for the direct link.

Meeting Minutes

The record of what was discussed and decided.

Like Meeting Attendees, this screen is not in the sidebar in this build; minutes are normally written against the meeting itself.

Minutes should record decisions, not conversation

The useful minute is what was decided and who is doing it, not a transcript of who said what.

If something in the minutes needs somebody to do something, it should also exist as an action item — otherwise it will be found again only when the minutes are next read, which may be never.

Action Items

Meetings → Action Items

The tasks that come out of meetings: what needs doing, who owns it, by when, and whether it is done.

This is the screen that makes the module worth using at all. A meeting that produces action items with owners and dates is a meeting that changed something.

An action item without an owner and a date is a wish

Two fields do all the work here: who and by when.

An action assigned to “the team” with no date will not be done, and nobody will be able to say who failed to do it. Assign every item to one named person.

Common questions

Can I see all my action items? Filter the list by owner. Filtering by owner and by status pending is the view most people actually want.

A meeting was cancelled. Update its status rather than deleting it. A cancelled meeting is a fact; a deleted one takes its agenda and its attendee list with it.

Are meetings on the calendar? They appear on the Calendar depending on what you have permission to see.

Can somebody outside the organization attend? Attendees are drawn from employee records. Record external participants in the meeting description or the minutes.

We use another tool for meetings. Then use this module only for its action items, or not at all. It is not required by anything else in the system.