Site/list rollups in SharePoint 2007

On the SharePoint TeamBlog, you can read about site roll-up webparts that are provided with Office SharePoint Server 2007.

I really miss this feature in the current version of SharePoint. Our company uses WSS sites a lot: every project has it’s own project portal and every release of a product we build gets it’s own build portal (shows reports of the daily build process). Often people are members of more than one project and lose track of their tasks and documents. Roll-ups are the only way to create, for example, a single list of tasks assigned to you. There are several products to create roll-ups, like Carlos Sanz’s csegRollUp (free) or CorasWorks (commercial product). Personally I’ve been using my own FlexListViewer-webpart (reason: testing it and it’s free!). It cannot create roll-ups, but by adding it multiple times on a page, it can display the contents of all lists you would like to roll-up.

So I’m glad this type of functionality will finally be included in the new SharePoint. However, I don’t like the shape in which it comes. I just posted this comment on the SharePoint TeamBlog:

“These webparts do a lot of plumbing themselves, but personally I would prefer some kind of roll-up webpart for one type of list (e.g. tasks) that I can customize myself: configure all lists to be rolled up and UI (perhaps use UI of first list and require same columns for all the others). That way it would be a lot more flexible, since I can create my own roll-ups. Furthermore I would not have to click a tab for every site, but instead perhaps see all items grouped by site or not grouped at all.“

These webparts are definitely an improvement, but their tabbed interface still makes it impossible for user to see all their tasks ‘at a glance’. So I really hope the SharePoint team will make it possible to select different UI-types/views on the rolled-up data.

Their blog-article also says the webparts come with Office SharePoint Server 2007 (thus not with WSS). I think the webparts use the SPS-search-engine to query all sites/lists, which is probably the reason why these webparts don’t come with WSS (which uses a less sophisticated search-engine (SQL’s Full Text Search). So all WSS-users (including myself) will have to keep using one of the above mentioned products :(.

(Robert te Kaat)