Working with meeting series

Meetings are often related to one another because they deal with the same subjects. When such a relation between meetings is known in advance, and when the meetings recur regularly, one simple way of handling this is to set up a recurring meeting. For more information, see "Scheduling a recurring meeting".

However, it may not always be known in advance which meetings belong together. A meeting that was originally considered completely unrelated to a particular subject may suddenly become important, and other meetings that were originally considered crucial may lose significance. Sometimes recurring meetings may need to be grouped with one-off meetings on the same subject. And very often, meetings related to the same subject are anything but regular but still need to be treated as part of the same group.

With MeetingBooster, you can group any number of meetings (including recurring meetings) using meeting series. Meetings can be added to and removed from the series as needed, providing a flexible way of keeping track of meetings related to a particular subject. You can assign members to a meeting series, making meeting scheduling easier. Meetings can be added to a meeting series when scheduling a new meeting on the MeetingBooster home page. For more information, see "Scheduling from MeetingBooster".

Meeting series are used in a similar way to projects, but whereas projects are used to organize tasks, meeting series are used to organize meetings. For more information about projects, see "Working with projects".

Meeting attributes (if this feature is used in your organization) are not set for an entire meeting series but can be added for each individual meeting. If an attribute is required, it must be defined for each meeting before it can be started. For more information, see "Setting meeting attributes".

Scheduling meetings in a meeting series can be made even easier by saving agenda templates that all members of the meeting series can use. For more information, see "Saving an agenda as a template".

Viewing meeting series

Click Meeting Series in the menu on the left on the MeetingBooster home page.

A list of meeting series in the organization is shown. For each meeting series, you can see the name of the organizer and the number of meetings and members in the series.

If your security roles allow it, you can click the name of the meeting series to see which meetings it contains and other details. On the list of meetings, clicking the title of a meeting that has not been executed opens the meeting for editing; clicking the title of a past meeting opens the meeting minutes.

Creating a new meeting series

Click New Series in the menu on the left on the MeetingBooster home page.

A dialog opens with the Details tab selected.

You can only create and edit meeting series if your security roles allow this. For more information, see "Understanding security roles" and "Managing security roles".

Enter the title of the series.

(Optional) Click Add Member or Remove as necessary to select members for the series. In the dialog that opens, you can specify the user name in the Add user field. As soon as you start typing, user names that match your search text are shown. You can also select a user from your most used or recently used users.

Adding members makes it easier to create new meetings in the meeting series, as all members of the series can be automatically added to new meetings. For more information, see "Scheduling from MeetingBooster".

(Optional) Select the Can create meetings check box next to a member if that member should be allowed to create meetings in the series.

The member can only create meetings if his or her security roles allow this. For more information, see "Understanding security roles" and "Managing security roles".

(Optional) Select the Can view all meetings check box next to a member if that member should be able to view the agendas and minutes of all meetings in the series. This includes meetings that the member was not invited to.

You can use this feature to allow escalation of topics from your meeting series to a higher-level meeting series within the organization. Simply add a user to your meeting series, and allow that user to view all meetings. The user you added will then be able to carry over topics from your meeting series to any other meeting series that he or she is a member of. Topics carried over in this way are called rolling topics; for more information, see "Adding rolling topics to an agenda".

Click Save or Save and Close.

The other tabs in the dialog contain other information on the meeting series:

The Meetings tab shows all meetings in the meeting series. Past meetings are shown in italics.

The Tasks tab shows all tasks relating to all meetings in the meeting series.

The Topics tab shows all topics belonging to past meetings created in the meeting series.

Options on the Meetings tab

Click a meeting title to see the meeting details (for upcoming meetings) or meeting minutes (for past meetings).

You can filter the meetings shown by meeting dates and/or search text.

Options on the Tasks tab

View, create, edit, export and delete tasks from the meeting series as described in "Managing tasks".

You can filter the tasks shown, and get a quick overview of task completion, using the same options as on the Tasks tab of the MeetingBooster home page. For more information on these options, see "Viewing meetings and tasks".

Options on the Topics tab

Click a topic title to see topic details.

Select one or more topics and click Create Meeting from Topics to create a new meeting in the meeting series with the selected topics on the agenda. For more information, see "Scheduling from MeetingBooster" and "Creating an agenda".

You can filter the topics shown using the Filter topics field.

Click Manage Topic Statuses to manage topic statuses for this meeting series. For more information, see "Managing topic statuses for a meeting series" in "Using topic statuses".

Editing a meeting series

Click Meeting Series in the menu on the left on the MeetingBooster home page.

Click the title of the meeting series you want to edit.

Edit the meeting series as necessary.

Click Save or Save and Close.

Adding a meeting to a series

You can add a meeting to a series in several ways:

By clicking New Meeting in the top right corner when creating or editing a meeting series as described above.

A dialog is opened where you can create the new meeting. The name of the meeting series that you have created or is editing is pre-selected on the Meeting Series drop-down.

By selecting the meeting series on the Meeting Series drop-down when creating a new meeting or editing an existing meeting.

By creating a new meeting from one or more topics on the Topics tab as described above.

A meeting can only belong to one meeting series. If the meeting should be assigned to a different meeting series, open the meeting for editing and select a different meeting series on the Meeting Series drop-down. Individual topics, however, can be carried over to other meeting series as described in "Adding rolling topics to an agenda".

For more information, see "Scheduling from MeetingBooster" and "Editing a meeting".

You can also add past meetings to a meeting series. For more information, see "Viewing meetings and tasks".

Deleting a meeting series

Click Meeting Series in the menu on the left on the MeetingBooster home page.

Click the cross next to the meeting series you want to delete.

You can delete meeting series created and used by other users. To avoid deleting important information, always double-check that a given meeting series should be deleted before deleting it.

You can only delete meeting series if your security roles allow this. For more information, see "Understanding security roles" and "Managing security roles".

The actual meetings in the series are not deleted, but they are no longer part of any series. Edit the meetings individually as necessary to assign them to other meeting series.