SharePoint Designers

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Custom Meeting workspace site template

It's time to deliver something back to the community!

In a project I recently worked in I found out the hard way that it wasn't possible to save a Meeting workspace (MW) as a custom template to recreate sites from. I also found out through Bing that I wasn't alone in my discovery :)

The other day I was discussing this with a colleague and by reproducing it I wanted to show him that the left navigation on the site between the different meetings would crack.
So I saved a MW as a new template and from that template I created a new MW from a calendar event. Then I created another calendar event and linked to the same MW. Navigating to the MW I could now see the two dates in the left nav. And do you know what? It worked!
I could actually navigate between the two dates! This has never worked before!
So why does it suddenly work? SP1 for SharePoint 2010 :)
My colleague who did not have SP1 installed, doing the same thing in his dev environment, got the old behavior, left navigation cracked. After installing SP1 he didn't have the problem any longer.
Isn't that great? When SP1 was released I actually went through the Excel file with all the fixes and couldn't find anything about this. I wish it could have been mentioned, it would have saved me and the client a lot of time.
 
Another thing to be aware of when you have meeting workspaces in a site collection and you for that site collection, wants to push out a custom master page on all sub sites. If you do that, the MWs will also be getting your custom master page. As you already might know, MWs have their own master page.
The result you will get by doing this is that (again) the left navigation will crack. You will get a JavaScript error telling you that a property bag is missing.
To fix this you will have to add this into your custom master page.
At the top add this Tagprefix:

<%@ Register Tagprefix="Meetings" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Meetings" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>


Below the FORM-tag below the BODY-tag add:

<Meetings:PropertyBag runat="server"/>

 

There is one more thing to add to this. In a MW there are two more options in the Site Actions menu.

"Add Pages" and "Manage Pages". These two options will also be lost when you apply another master page than the default for a MW. I don't have a solution for how to handle that as for now. But some how I think it's needed to make the Site Actions menu dynamic and show these options only if the site is created from a MW template.

 

/Niax

Views: 1554

Tags: MasterPage, Meeting, Template

Comment

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Comment by Christian Ståhl on November 10, 2011 at 1:23pm

Great information!

Indeed it's a bit tricky that you acually can change the master to for example V4.master from the browser for a meeting WS, and if you do this you'll not see any differences visually when V4 has been applied to such site, there's only differences in functions like the reference, the property bag and the options in the Site Actions.

/ C

Comment by Jenny Hallqvist on November 10, 2011 at 12:58pm

Nice one Niax!

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