SharePoint: Creating Committee Sites

SharePoint: Creating Committee Sites

Prerequisites Time in the classroom is precious it is an opportunity for you to interact with the workshop leader and other participants through questions and discussions and to share your experiences and concerns. To make the most of this time we sometimes ask you to carry out learning activities ahead of the workshop so that everyone comes into the class with the same basic knowledge. We keep this prior learning to a minimum and often make use of Lynda.com videos. Lynda.com videos can be accessed by University members anytime, anywhere, through a browser or app. The workshop description will tell you if any prior learning is required. If you don t have an environment where you can do this learning, you can come along to one of our Lynda Labs. These are scheduled every week, and are a quiet space where you can work through Lynda.com videos or other workshop resources. It is important before you attend this course that you are comfortable working with SharePoint you must be familiar with both the ribbon, adding/deleting navigation. If you turn up to a workshop without having the prior knowledge, the workshop leader may suggest that you come back on another session. Copyright Traci Huggins makes this booklet and the accompanying slides available under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). The Oxford University crest and logo and IT Services logo are copyright of the University of Oxford and may only be used by members of the University in accordance with the University s branding guidelines. About the workshop designer Traci Huggins has over a decade s experience in teaching, she has worked as a Computing Lecturer, Course Leader and Tutor in Further Education writing and delivering courses for Levels 1 to Level 5, she has also co-wrote a new Foundation Degree in Computing Science course in conjunction with Oxford Brookes University. Traci s teaching knowledge covers Excel, Business Computing, Information Systems, Web Design (HTML/CSS/WordPress) and SharePoint. She is a highly committed teacher who likes to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to learn to use technology in their study or workplace both effective and efficiently. Revision history Version Date Author Comments 1.0 September 2016 Traci Huggins

About this workshop An Oxford Committee site is deployed in the same was as any other site, you must make sure that you select Oxford Committee site template. Once you have deployed the site it will take a small amount of configuration to tailor it to a particular committee. What you will learn By the end of the session you will be confident in deploying, setting up and running a Committee Site What you need to know It is important that before you embark on this course that you are comfortable working within the SharePoint environment. The resources you need Sample Images and text that you can use to experiment with will be available, but you might like to bring along your own. Unless you have been told otherwise, there will be a computer available for you to use with the following tools installed: Internet Explorer Firefox SharePoint Training Accounts You can bring along your own laptop if you want to just bear in mind that I am not an expert in every tool (although I am sure that between us we will be able to solve most issues!). Learning objectives This workshop covers the following learning objectives; Learning Objective One Deploy a Committee Site Learning Objective Two Break permission inheritance and re-configure site level permissions. Learning Objective Three Create member groups and set permissions for new groups. Learning Objective Four Enable the publishing feature. Learning Objective Five Add configuration for the Calendar and Members Page. Learning Objective Six Set the administration links on the QLP. Learning Objective Seven Working with and understanding Optional Configuration. Learning Objective Eight Optional Configuration I will point you at a variety of resources that will help you in achieving these objectives. They can all be downloaded from the ITLC Portfolio at; http://portfolio.it.ox.ac.uk/resource/course-pack/nexus-oxford-committee-sites-sharepoint/2013

Learning objective One Deploy a Committee Site To enable you to create a new site using the Oxford Committee Template, you need to follow these instructions; From Site Settings (the gear icon) Site Contents New Subsite from Select a Template choose the Custom Tab then select Oxford_committee template on offer. Give the New Site a name and description choose a URL that matches the name of the site (leave spaces out or use underscore). Your Committee Site is now up and ready to configure for your use. To Do:. Create a new site using the Oxford Committee template. Give the site a Name then give the site a URL with no spaces. Do Not use Unique Permissions. Choose Yes to use the top link bar from the parent site.

Learning objective Two Break permission inheritance and re-configure site level permissions The first thing that you will want to do once your committee site is created is to stop inheriting permissions; It is important that you do this as at present the committee site will inherit the permissions of the parent site. To do this click you need to click on Manage Access which appears on the left hand side, select Stop Inheriting Permissions next, click OK. What happens now is that once you stop inheriting permissions from the parent site another window opens and asks you to either use an existing group or create a group(s). It is always a good idea to use groups when working with committee sites, as groups allow you to assign different permissions levels, depending on the documents; SharePoint will allow you to assign Visitors, Members and Owners, you will notice that you are assigned as both a Member and an Owner, you now have the option to add other staff to this Committee Site. You also have the option to change the names given to these groups by SharePoint to whatever name you require. To Do:. With the Committee Site you have just created Stop Inheriting Permissions and create yourself new groups for this committee, ensuring that you give the groups relevant names. When you are happy with the groups click OK to save the changes made.

Learning objective Three Create member groups and set permission for new groups You can create many groups for your committee site depending on needs/requirements remember that each of these groups can have different access levels to you can decide exactly what people can and can t do. To create other groups you need to click on Manage Access from the left hand side click on Create Group, give the group a name e.g. Committee Owners, Committee Visitors etc. decide on access rights etc., click OK. It is quite often good practice when creating groups and assigning levels; it should be Full Control for the site owner and Read for all other member groups

Learning objective Four Enable the Publishing Feature Enabling the publishing feature is not strictly necessary but a lot of functionality depends on it. However enabling this feature now is likely to save troubleshooting in the future. To enable it go to Site Settings click on Manage Site Features under Site Settings and then find SharePoint Server Publishing and click on Activate. Edit the Home Page: Update the name of the committee and either delete or replace the explanatory text. As with any other page or sub site that you are working on in SharePoint to edit and update the page you need to click on Page Edit from the ribbon. To Do:. Create a couple of different groups with different permissions levels that would be relevant to your particular committee site. Once your groups are completed enable the publishing feature to save yourself time in later exercises. Make the necessary changes to the heading of the site (Oxford Committee Site) and either edit or remove the explanatory text underneath to meet your particular requirements.

Learning objective Five Configure the Calendar and Members Page Calendar Configuration: Information about meetings are recorded in a calendar entry and it is useful to set some defaults here. The title property is not used by the committee site for filtering or grouping but is a required SharePoint Column. Setting a default value avoids the need to populate this field when calendar entries are added. The Committee name property is a useful way to mark the calendar entries and associated documents with the committee they belong to. As the value will always be the same it makes sense for it to be set as a default. Click on Manage Calendar on the left hand side then click on List from the ribbon and choose List Settings. Once in list settings scroll down the columns section until you reach Committee Name click on Committee Name and then give this the name of your actual committee site in my case it would be ITLC Committee the title of the calendar entry is not important, setting a default value avoids the need to set it each time an entry is added. Configure the Members page; The Members page display the membership of each group you created when setting the site level permissions. To configure who can have access to the committee pages you firstly need to select Members from the QLP, you will then be faced with three boxes; Owners, Members and Visitors these are all the people that have access to your committee site. Click Page on the ribbon, then select Edit, this will then give you the opportunity to click on the down arrow of each of the Owners, Members and Visitors access. Use the down arrow and choose Edit Web Parts

This then will allow you to change the site users for Owners / Members / Visitors the show people and groups with direct permission on this site will be the default display if you put a tick in the box Show people in the group, and search for the groups that you have created and then you can add these to that section on the Committee Site. To Do:. Use the above instructions to locate the Members of the site and choose the groups that you wish to be members of the site and display these in the appropriate sections i.e. Owners, Members and Visitors.

Learning objective Six Set the administration links on the QLP The Oxford Committee sites include a number of links on the left which are intended to help the site owner. They are not relevant to committee members and could be confusing. For this reason the links should be set so that they only appear for members of the site owners group. From the Site Settings click on Navigation (under Look and Feel), scroll down to Navigation Editing and Sorting select Site Admin click Edit and then with the Select Audiences box will appear, ready for you to choose who you want to have access to this committee site, use the search facility to find the group that you have set up my group was called ITLC Committee Managers, once the correct group(s) are located click Add and then click OK. To Do:. Use the above instructions to ensure that the links are only visible to you the site owner.

Learning objective Seven Understanding and working with optional configuration Optional Configuration: Before you begin to work with the optional configuration for your Committee Site, you would be wise to answer the questions below which will indicate whether any additional configuration is required for your committee site. 1. Is Meeting 01, Meeting 02, etc. a suitable naming scheme for your Committee? If not see Setting your own meeting ID. 2. Does your committee run by Academic year rather than the calendar year? If so see Grouping meeting by Academic Year'. 3. Do you have different groups of members who should have different levels of access to committee documents? If so see Using security levels. 4. Do you want to publish minutes to a wider audience? For example the whole department or even the whole University. If so see Publicising committee data. 5. Do you want to publicise meeting dates to a wider audience? For example the whole department or even the whole University. If so see Publicising committee data. 6. Do you have more than 3 groups for your site? If so see Adding additional groups to the Members page. Setting your own meeting ID Many committees refer to meetings by an ID rather than simply by date. For example 2016 Meeting 01 or an incrementing number. The template is configured to use a meeting ID scheme of Meeting 01, Meeting 02, etc. This can be changed to suit the committee, to alter the meeting ID scheme do the following;

1. Under the Columns heading click on Meeting ID. 2. In the choice field enter your meeting ID scheme. Or if you intend to use an incrementing number you can set the column to be a number column. Note that you can t easily set it back to be a choice field once you have made it a number column. Either set your own meeting ID scheme or change the column to be a number column which will allow you to assign each meeting a number for an ID.

Using the meeting date as the ID If you don t use any sort of meeting ID and just refer to meetings by date you can omit the field when you add meetings to the calendar. You will need to make a small change to the confirmation of the Documents library which by default links to the calendar based on meeting ID. You will need to change the linked calendar entry to look up the start date rather than meeting name. From manage documents click on Library Settings on the Library tab on the ribbon then click on the linked calendar entry under columns and set is as below; Grouping meetings by the academic year If your committee runs by the academic year rather than the calendar year, make sure that you set the academic year field when adding calendar entries and optionally the term field. You will need to change the All meetings page to use the academic year version, from Site Settings click on, navigation under Look and Feel, scroll down the page until you come to the Structural Navigation: Sorting, select All meetings then click Edit.

Adding additional groups to the Members Page; If you have more than 3 groups of committee members and you want to display the membership of the additional groups on the Members page you will need to add additional web parts to the page to do this follow these instructions; 1. Click on the Page tab and Edit 2. In one of the columns place the cursor below an existing site users web part and type the name of the new group, highlight the text and set the mark-up style (in the ribbon at the top) to coloured heading 2. 3. Place the cursor below the heading you just added then click on the insert Web Part Site users (under social Collaboration) then select Add. Then configure as per Configure the Members page The image above is not the same as the image I have been looking at on the old course notes as the image there showed lots of different categories including one called Social Collaboration and site users etc. a bit confused.com Setting up a meeting This next section assumes that the committee site has been deployed and configured as per the notes Setting up a committee site. The steps described here are the basic ones required to set up a meeting, this will display documents to the committee members organised by meeting. The home page will pick out the documents for the next and last meetings. Documents for previous meetings are available on the All meetings page. See Optional configuration for additional functions you may want to use.

Add the meeting to the calendar All the information about the meeting is recorded in a calendar entry. This includes the start time and whether the meeting is the next one or the last. Add the meeting to the calendar from Manage calendar then add new event. Then fill in the fields appropriately, set it to be the next meeting. From the same view configure the next or last property on the previous entries. Create the meeting folder

If your meetings follow the calendar year the folder structure does not need to be any more complicated than a top level folder for the year and a subfolder for each meeting. If your committee follows the academic you might want to have a folder level for terms but this isn t essential. There are some additional configuration steps if you do go by the academic year see Setting up a committee site. The easiest way to create your folder structure for your committee site is to firstly click on Manager Folders from the left here you have the option to add folders for the documents to be held in (i.e. years), you can then click on the years and add sub Folders for the documents to be stored in name the folders Upload the meeting documents

As with create the folder there are two interfaces for this the browser and Explorer view; Using the browser From the folder created above, click on Upload Multiple documents and select the documents to upload from your local drive Using Explorer View With the library open in Windows Explorer, copy the documents to the folder by copying and pasting. Set up the meeting property on the documents The documents must be linked to the calendar entry you created in the first step. This makes all the information about the meeting such as the start time, available as properties which can be used to sort and group documents. From Manage documents, browse to the new meeting folder and click on Datasheet view ; Note that the Quick Edit is on the Library tab of the ribbon. From within Quick Edit view click the linked calendar entry cell for the first document and set it to the meeting you created previously. You can then copy this value to all the other documents by dragging it as you would in a spreadsheet. Click on a different cell (doesn t matter which) then click back into the cell and this time you will have a black +, which you can click on and drag down the column. When you have finished click on the Standard view button to save your settings and return to the main library view.

Learning Objective Eight - Optional Configurations In addition to the basic functions described above, your committee may require some of the additional functionality listed below; Managing meetings Having set up a meeting and uploaded documents you may need to make changes, some common scenarios are described below; Altering the meeting date If the meeting date is changed update the entry in the calendar, click on Manage Calendar click on the edit icon next to the calendar entry and set a new date. Uploading additional documents Additional documents are uploaded in the same way as the initial documents were uploaded the only point to bear in mind is that the linked calendar entry property must be set. Cancelling a meeting One option is to simply delete the entry from the calendar and any documents relating to the meeting, however if the document s need to remain on the site for reference the meeting can be marked as cancelled. The flag will be displayed on the home page and on the All Meetings page. Using Publishing; Introduction With the default site configuration as soon as you have uploaded documents and set the linked calendar entry, members will be able to see them. If you need to control exactly when documents are made available to members you can use major/minor versioning. Note that by default versioning is not enabled on the site, to enable it see Additional site configuration. Once versioning has been enable on the Documents library, documents will have minor version of 0.1 when they are initially uploaded to the site. Members will not see minor versions of documents and as the document doesn t have a major version yet, they will not see it at all. When you are ready to make the document s available to members click on Publish documents and follow the steps; NB: if you are using publishing, this should always be the last thing that you do. If you make a change after you have published the documents for example change a document from being above the line to below you must republish the document for members to be able to see the change. Additional Site Configuration Versioning needs to be enable on Documents and set to major/minor; from Manage documents library settings under the library tab of the ribbon click on Versioning Settings under General Settings. It is also helpful to add the Version field to the manage documents view so that you can easily see if documents have been published, from the Library tab lick on Modify view. Under columns put a tick next to version then add the last of the images for this section. Using Announcements Announcements can be a useful mechanism for communicating with committee members, especially when used in conjunction with Alert plus which can be configured to periodically email site members with any announcements which have been added. See Alert Plus documentation for details. Click on Manage announcements on the left hand side, from the announcements list, click on new item and then fill out the title and body of the announcement, the expiry date is optional.

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SharePoint: Creating Committee Sites Your comfort is important.. Traci Huggins Traci.Huggins@it.ox.ac.uk The toilets are along the corridor outside the lecture rooms The rest area is where you registered The swivel seats are adjustable You can adjust the monitors for height, tilt and brightness The Course Handbook.. Course Outline.. Contains notes on each topic + slides Tasks for you to practice during today s course Work at your own pace Follow up work Continue with exercises after the session Course Clinics and Lynda Labs SharePoint Training Accounts Committee Template Deploying a Site Permissions Create Member Groups Enable Publishing Configure the Calendar Members Page Setting Admin links on the QLP Create Meetings Folders Meetings Optional Configuration Training Accounts.. Committee Template.. 1

Deploying a Site Permissions. Break permission inheritance and re-configure site level permissions Create Member Groups.. Enable the Publishing Feature... Configure the Calendar.. Members Page.. Information about meetings are recorded in a calendar entry and it is useful to set some defaults here 2

Setting Administration links on the QLP Create the Meetings Folder Meetings Optional Configuration Managing Meeting Altering the meeting date Uploading additional documents Cancelling a meeting Additional site configuration This presentation is made available by Traci Huggins under a Creative Commons licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA Individual images may be subject to their own copyright conditions and where possible this is acknowledged in the presentation traci.huggins@it.ox.ac.uk 3