Windows Small Business Server 2011 : Customizing a SharePoint Site - Customizing Companyweb (part 1) - Adding a Workspace

You can customize Companyweb to add additional lists, links, and libraries. Working with a SharePoint site to customize it is pretty straightforward and follows a similar logic wherever you are. We’ll start by adding a regular IT team meeting and creating a workspace for it that allows IT team members to file their reports ahead of time and add comments to others’ reports.

1. Adding a Workspace

Adding a workspace creates an area where a group of users can directly interact and share documents and discussions, separate from the overall document libraries. For our example, let’s first create a recurring meeting and assign users to the meeting, following these steps:

1. From the main Companyweb page, click Add New Event in the Calendar section of the center pane to open the Calendar – New Item page.

2. Type in a title and location for this meeting, set the time and date to next Monday at 9 AM, finishing at 10 AM, and add a description as shown in Figure 1.

   Figure 1. Adding a new Calendar item

   

3. Select the Make This A Repeating Event check box. The Recurrence section will expand as shown in Figure 2.

   Figure 2. The Make This A Repeating Event section of a new Calendar item

   

4. Set the meeting for Weekly, and set it to end after 10 occurrences.

5. Select the Use A Meeting Workspace check box, and click Save to open the New Meeting Workspace page shown in Figure 3.

   Figure 3. Creating a new workspace for the IT team meeting

   

6. Select Use Unique Permissions in the User Permissions section, and click OK to open the Template Selection page.

7. Select Basic Meeting Workspace for this meeting, and click OK to open the Set Up Groups For This Site page shown in Figure 4.

8. Add users as members of this site by selecting the Create A New Group option and typing in their account names, separated by semicolons. Click the Check Names icon to verify the names.

9. To add additional owners, repeat the previous step with names for the owners of this site.

10. When you’ve set the permissions as you want, click OK to open the workspace you’ve created, as shown in Figure 5.

    Figure 4. The Set Up Groups For This Site page

    

    Figure 5. The new Weekly IT Team Meeting workspace

    

11. Click Manage Attendees to open the Attendees page, and click the Items tab. Then click New Item to open the Attendees – New Item page shown in Figure 6. Type in the name for the attendee and click Save.

    Figure 6. The Attendees – New Item page

    

12. Repeat the previous step until you’ve added all the attendees to the list, as shown in Figure 7.

    Figure 7. Attendees have been added to our team meeting.

    

13.   Click Navigate Up next to the Site Actions button to return to the main page for this workspace.

14. Click Add New Item in the Agenda section to create an agenda for the current meeting, as shown in Figure 8.

    Figure 8. Adding an agenda item to the meeting

    

15. Repeat the previous step as required to add items to the agenda, as shown in Figure 9.

    Figure 9. The agenda for the next IT team meeting is filled out

    

16. Use the Navigate Up button to navigate back to the main Companyweb page.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 supports additional types of sites and libraries beyond workspaces, as shown in Figure 10. One really useful library type is the Wiki Page Library. Adding any of these is an essentially similar process to adding the workspace we’ve just added, though the particular steps and options will be different for different types.

Figure 10. You can create new libraries, lists, pages and sites to support a wide variety of collaboration