best customized/branded meeting workspace

Question

I am trying to find customized Meeting Workspace, but google didn't helped me at all, if someone knows please link me,

Default Meeting workspace can be viewed by going to link given below,

Basic Meeting WorkSpace

As I have Been asked what can I do to Improve it, but I dont see any major thing I can add, any suggestions please ?

Answer 1

Customizing Meeting Workspaces is not as straight forward as one could expect unfortunately (both SP2007 and SP2010).

First of all you cannot use Web Templates or Custom Site Definitions because Outlook often will be the one creating the sites using web services, and it is only aware of the OOB site definitions.

As i stated in comments elsewhere, feature stapling isnt reliable for meeting templates. I experienced race conditions between modules and list instances when using feature stapling for meeting templates.

I ended up using a custom provisioning provider for my customization task. Something along the lines of this:

    class MeetingWorkspaceProvisioningProvider : SPWebProvisioningProvider
    {
        public override void Provision(SPWebProvisioningProperties properties)
        {
            SPWeb site = properties.Web; // NOTE: dont dispose this web!


            // provision Blank Meeting Template
            site.ApplyWebTemplate("MPS#1");

            // your logic here
            // could be creating libraries, pages, adding web parts etc
            // it is a good idea to load an XML file using properties.Data to make provider more generic
        }
    }

You will also need a WEBTEMP*.xml file along the lines of:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Templates xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint">
  <Template Name="MYmeetingWorkspace" ID="10004">
    <Configuration ID="0"
    Title="My Meeting Forum"
    Hidden="FALSE"
    Description="My Meeting Workspace"
    ProvisionAssembly="$SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$"
    ProvisionClass="MY.MeetingFora.Portal.ProvisioningProviders.MeetingWorkspaceProvisioningProvider"
    ProvisionData="1033\xml\MY\ProvisioningData.xml"
    SubWebOnly="TRUE"
    DisplayCategory="Custom" >
    </Configuration>
  </Template>
</Templates>

Answer 2

The meeting workspace use a different master page this Master Page is named mwsdefaulv4.master. You can create your own master page based on this. To deploy and use you use feature stapling to enhance the meeting workspace template.

For more information take a look at http://blog.brianfarnhill.com/2008/03/feature-stapling-why-you-should-love-it