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Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

As the usage of SharePoint increases, there is a profileration of SharePoint sites. This makes it harder and harder to keep track of where your documents are located and also to see a unified view of your "stuff".

In Office SharePoint Server 2007, we are introducing a couple of new web parts that address this problem.

1. On My Site (personal roll-up)

The first one is the SharePoint Sites (the name may change by RTM) web part. This web part is meant to be used in your personal site, and it automatically rolls up all the documents created, modified, checked-out to you as well as tasks assigned to you in every site that you are a Member of.

Each site shows up as a "tab" and will show you the documents and tasks assigned to you. In addition, you can manually add additional tabs that point to any SharePoint site.

How does it know what sites to show automatically?

In Office SharePoint Server, there is a user and membership sync engine that figures out which sites you are a Member of. The engine requires that the user explicitly be in the Members group of that site. The SharePoint Create Site and User Management UI allows you to provision and manage this group by default.

2. On any SharePoint Site (Generic Rollup)

A second web part called Sites Rollup (name may change for RTM) can be used on any SharePoint site (Team site, Document workspace, etc.). This web part allows you to create tabs to each site you want to show and also allows you to specify a rollup page in those sites. It does not automatically populate the list of sites based on who is viewing the part.

Venky Veeraraghavan - PM
Published Friday, March 10, 2006 7:53 PM by sptblog

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# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

It is a shame that the personal roll-up part requires the user explicitly be in the Members group. We have been encouraging site administrators to use AD groups wherever possible, as it reduces the administration overhead for obvious reasons.

Can't the sync engine parse through the groups that the user is a member of (and implicitly, the groups that the groups are members of, etc, etc)?

--Philip
Saturday, March 11, 2006 11:18 AM by Philip Colmer

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

Does this mean I still can't see one list of all my tasks? I still need to click each tab to see each set of tasks for each SharePoint site? So what you have done is replaced my links web part that I currently have on My Site which I have created a link to each task list that I need to check with a web part that creates those links for me? Not really much of a time saver. Would prefer Coras Works web parts functionality which rolls up information from multiple SharePoint sites and displays the items in one list that I can sort, filter, group etc.
Saturday, March 11, 2006 4:30 PM by David

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

What about a list of all sites that I am a member of? All open issues assigned to me? Etc. Without having to click from tab to tab?

Just wondering if this will need to be custom functionality?

Monday, March 13, 2006 1:38 PM by Matthew

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

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 rollups. 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.
Monday, March 13, 2006 1:58 PM by Robert te Kaat

# Site/list rollups in SharePoint 2007

Monday, March 13, 2006 2:46 PM by Portals

# Information Rollup coming Office SharePoint Server 2007!

Monday, March 13, 2006 3:21 PM by Jason Medero's SharePointing into Collaboration

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

What happens when there are 50 or more web sites containing documents you have contributed to?

Does it automatically create 50 tabs for you or is there a control mechanism?

Even then it would seem challenging to determine which documents to include in the listing without some form of prioritisation or weighting. Is there more development effort scheduled with this in mind?
Monday, March 13, 2006 3:29 PM by Patrick Wools

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

Not related to SharePoint...

Guys,

Change your color choice for mouse over. I'm sorry to say but the blog look just pathetic......
Monday, March 13, 2006 9:53 PM by Pankaj

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

David - We choose not to invest in a single web task rollup because we already have Outlook sync on the Client and OWA on the web. That said, our part will show all tasks in a given site collection inside the tab (it's just below the docs webpart).

Matthew - The list of all sites you are a member of is available through the profile object model. We explicitly chose not to roll-up over all sites because they may be different farms, web applications or continents. Creating a single view will be both non-performant and generate a complicated UI experience. Imagine being a member of 30 sites and having 5-10 documents in each, to show them all together you have a list of 150-300 docs, not a ideal user experience. That said, you may absolutely use the object model and web services to generate a single list, but we didn't focus on absolute rollup.

Robert te Kaat - The ability to do custom roll-ups over a content type or across lists in a site collection already exists in the "Content by Query" part. We just provide a bunch of canned queries (Docs: Authored by, Created by, Checked out as well as Tasaks: Assigned to). In addition, you can modify our page (myinfo.aspx) or create a new page that does your custom rollup and point the part at that.

General - Tabs vs. Single list
There are two reasons why we choose to break up by tabs:
1. User Experience: Users are very comfortable with the idea of sites, its context and content in them. The tabs help organize information by that and break up what could be a very large list of items that will need to be rolled-up. Yes, we could have chosen to show the site as a piece of metadata and grouped-by or sorted-by that column, but that doesn't show the containership of the sites and its docs nearly as explicitly.

2. Technical: Because sites can be in any farm (in North America, Japan, Singapore and Dublin, in MS' case), doing a cross-farm, cross-site collection, cross-list query is NOT going to be fast and responsive, as a user would expect. That said, we could have used client-side scripting to pull all this info asynchronously, but then they wouldn't act as a single list easily. We didn't have the resources to build a complete list interaction model in Ajax in this version.

Patrick Wools - If you see the first picture in my post, there is a menu item called "Memberships >". That flyout contains all the sites you are member of. The number of tabs can be extended by user preference, but we show the first 5 sites in the list. You can add and remove tabs just like you can in IE7 or Firefox. So, if you are working on a project, you can pull all the sites related to that project into tabs. Since this info is stored in the web part, users can also drag more than one of these roll-up parts, pick the sites you want to rollup and name the webparts by their project or task they are trying to accomplish.

Pankaj - I noticed that the hover over has been fixed, it doesn't look like c%@? any more. Thanks for pointing it out.

Venky
Tuesday, March 14, 2006 5:27 PM by sptblog

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

Thanks for changing the mouse over color in the style sheet. The blog look awesome. Can't wait to see SharePoint 2007.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006 9:43 PM by Pankaj

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

Great post. I know lots of folks want the rollups to be more automatic, but balancing performance in large environments in critical :-)

Looks like custom rollups will be a LOT easier int he next version..I am stoked :-)

Steve
Wednesday, March 15, 2006 1:52 PM by Steve Walker

# RollUp von Listen und Sites in SharePoint 2007

Venky Veeraraghavan vom SharePoint Team hat im SharePoint Team Blog über das RollUp von Listen und Sites...
Friday, March 17, 2006 3:53 PM by SharePoint, SharePoint and stuff

# Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites (O12 / Office 2007)

Friday, March 17, 2006 5:07 PM by Steve Bargelt

# Sharing Points » Blog Archive » Use of SharePoint Roll ups.

PingBack from https://stephenmuller.wordpress.com/2006/03/14/use-of-sharepoint-roll-ups/
Saturday, March 18, 2006 5:17 AM by Sharing Points » Blog Archive » Use of SharePoint Roll ups.

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

It seems like most of the focus here is on narrowing down / filtering what you see on a site.  I think what people could really use is a way to visually summarize or display all the information that's contained in a site; maybe a tree view of expandable / explodable  headings for all lists, calendars, etc. on a site.  A site map.

I consider myself to be an evangelist for SharePoint services, even though I'm not a web part programmer.  As an experiment, I've tried to convince various groups to use default SharePoint sites for collaboration, and the common problem I see over and over is that people just can't get a decent view of what's on the site.  They don't know where to look for anything, and unless you spend a lot of time training them or establishing guidelines, (difficult in some volunteer groups) they have a hard time getting started.  These aren't programmers; they're intelligent people who have come together to do some work (a church group, a scout troop, a work group in the office).  When presented with the default page, they just don't get it.

On the other hand, if I give a bunch of programmers a default sharepoint site, as a general rule, they get it right away.  It's taken some discussion and some "listening" to people and their questions to finally arrive at the conclusion that people need a map.  Anyone else have this experience?  Perhaps there's already a standard web part that does it, but if not, it seems like a really useful part to build into the next version.

Friday, April 07, 2006 6:32 PM by Richard Brown

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

@Richard:
What's wrong with the Quick-Launch bar? Is displays all lists and document libraries that should be of interest to the end-user.
If it contains too many lists and doclibs, maybe the conclusion is that you need to create subsites/subareas.
Ask yourself the question if there is any relation between some of the lists and/or doclibs. If so, they should probably reside together on a separate subsite.
This does however bring some new challenges, like: which subsites does this site have (not out-of-the-box available in 2003, but plenty of free webparts available), or how do I see lists of subsites on a root-site (rollups!). Both problems are solved in a way with the 2007-version.
Monday, April 10, 2006 3:04 AM by kwaazaar

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

I totally agree with the need of a site directory... I actually thought there will be built in one, right after I saw the built in breadcrumb part... But I gues not :(

I got my custom Site Directory webpart for WSS, shows a tree view of all the sites the user has access to, shows the parent site, the immediate children of the parent site, and the children of the current site you are in. Uses the built-in icons for the site type (like team site or meeting workspace), plus a spacer.gif for the tree view appearance :) (gotta love the spacer.gif technology)

I will post the cab on my blog ASAP... Seems like can help a lot of people...

As for the lists and libraries, I tried it and the treeview went far beyond what I was looking for...

How can we get the Beta?

thanks

Thursday, April 27, 2006 2:28 PM by Duray AKAR

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

I posted my implemetation of Windows sharepoint services site directory on my blog, http://sharepointdiary.blogspot.com.

I will share the code or the CAB if anyone is interested
Friday, May 05, 2006 9:06 AM by Duray AKAR

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

Duray, your Web Part looks very cool and should prove to be useful for many WSS V2 users. I'd encourage you to setup a GotNetDot CodeGallery project space, which provides online discussions, bug tracking, and download stats for your Web Part. I would be glad to associated your project to the SharePoint Featured Group(http://www.gotdotnet.com/codegallery/directory.aspx?GID=3b291620-c6d4-4a6a-a222-a6253aa8859f) to give it more exposure.
Friday, May 05, 2006 11:51 AM by Lawrence Liu [MSFT]

# What's new in SharePoint, in Sesame Street Markup Language

Sunday, May 21, 2006 11:38 AM by Marwan Tarek Blog

# 2007 Microsoft Office Server System Reference Material

Download SharePoint Beta2:

Important Documentation Prior to SharePoint Beta 2 Installation
Get...
Monday, June 12, 2006 1:22 PM by The Boiler Room - Mark Kruger, SharePoint MVP

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

The Sites Rollup will work for sites, but what about portal areas?  Or is it assumed that it will work in portal areas as well because "everything is a site?"
Friday, September 01, 2006 9:16 AM by Craig Condon

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

Here is an application I found to create the sharepoint subsites! http://www.darkblueduck.com/Products/SiteProvisioningSmall.aspx
Friday, September 29, 2006 8:30 AM by Rowan Good

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

I am currently a student performing research on a product for a Finnish Microsoft Certified Partner in Finland called neoxen.  www.neoxen.com   They have a product that will be able to provide one shareable view of documents in different sharepoint sites as well as other areas within your network.  My question is wheter in the new version of sharepoint, if this type of capability is already provided.

Sunday, November 12, 2006 11:27 AM by Matt Purdy

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

I installed MOSS 2007 Std Edition and added couple of users as Members in all sites across three site collections. But the "Sharepoint SItes" web part on My Sites is not showing any memberships. I did a full import on User Profiles. Can someone help in this? Thanks in advance.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007 12:43 AM by dnkumar

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

Quick question...if I have a MOSS server and an existing WSS 2.0 servr, what are my options for gtting MOSS to "see" the WSS content? Specifically, I want to use the "My SharePoint Sites" part to full advantage, i.e. automagically show all WSS sites that the viewer is a named member of.

Is there any way to do it without upgrading WSS to 3.0?

Wednesday, May 02, 2007 8:24 PM by Shmuel Bollen

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

In our MOSS07 deployment, users' Sharepoint Sites Memberships list (which feeds numerous webparts) is being discovered correctly, but their URLs are malformed.

Early in our deployment (single server except for databases), sites were accessed via normal http like http://teams.company.com:nnnn, but then we switched to require SSL access so now all sites are accessed like https://teams.company.com.  To do this we changed the access mapping url to the secure form and updated all the site directory and search center links accordingly.  Everything now works fine (mysites and portal sites) via https, except users' Sharepoint Site Membership urls are still coming up in the earlier form of http://teams.company.com:nnnn/... which is now disabled.

How can I fix this?

Sunday, June 03, 2007 12:07 AM by Karim

# 2007 MOSS Resource Links (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server)

2007 MOSS Resource Links (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server) Here is an assortment of various 2007 Microsoft

Tuesday, July 17, 2007 12:46 PM by The Boiler Room - Mark Kruger, Microsoft SharePoint MVP

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

<<1. User Experience: Users are very comfortable with the idea of sites, its context and content in them. The tabs help organize information by that and break up what could be a very large list of items that will need to be rolled-up. Yes, we could have chosen to show the site as a piece of metadata and grouped-by or sorted-by that column, but that doesn't show the containership of the sites and its docs nearly as explicitly. >>

Venky, we love sharepoint 2007. We switched over from plone and it is a night and day difference for our users.

You make an interesting points in your responses. However I think if you look in the general community, this rollup functionality is one of the biggest needs that users have. It is frustrating for users to have to click tabs to see individual tasks. It is much easier to scroll through a long list. Im sure your usability experts must have some insight into this. Here are some use cases:

Each functional area in a company has calendar events, we want to roll those up into a company calendar so everyone can see a unified company calendar of all events. These events could be expense payments from finance, last day to to enroll for changes to benefits etc. People naturally classify by date (i.e. what is important in the near future) then by functional area. You are forcing people to classify by functional area then by date.

Each functional area owns announcements, we want those to roll up to the top level so everyone can see the running list of announcements from any functional area. No one is interested in clicking each tab to see if there is anything new. If at any given time only one tab has an announcement am I really going to keep clicking all 12 tabs to see if there is anything new?

I have tasks in multiple functional areas (12) I need to prioritize between them, but I have no way to do this because they are all in different tabs.

I understand your point about containership of documents, but the most relevant use cases have nothing to do with documents (although a single document rollup expressed as a tree would be helpful too). As less technical people use sharepoint the concept of containers is probably completely lost on them.

Thursday, August 02, 2007 10:47 AM by Anthony Chen

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

You want extensive roll-up capabilities with all data across sites & site collections then I stongly recommend buying CorasWorks they have it all and its so fast and easy!

Thursday, August 02, 2007 1:16 PM by dhall17

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

The content query web part does a pretty reasonable job of rolling up without too much pain in getting it working at a primitive level.

Thursday, August 02, 2007 5:58 PM by Anthony Chen

# how we can access share point site through vb.net application

I install moss2007 in one that is in lan . I can acess the  share point site  in borwse . I can't acess share point site in vb.net application in another pc

Monday, October 29, 2007 6:55 AM by sridharreddymandala

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

Is the csegRollUp web part compatible with MOSS/WSS 3.0?  We have used this web part extensively in our SP2003 environment.

Monday, December 03, 2007 2:55 PM by lmcclellan

# re: Rolling up information in SharePoint Sites

Anthony - we are trying (desperately) to do the same kinds of roll-ups as you (lists, announcements, and other items on subsites summarized on the parent site). Are you saying that you figured out how to do this with the "content query web part?" I am very new to Sharepoint and cannot even FIND this webpart! Could somebody please explain, for us primitives, how to roll up announcements from 2-3 subsites onto the parent site? I know several teams, in my organization and others, who would find this information extremely valuable! There does not seem to be anything on it in the Help, the manuals...even doing a search on "content query web part" within Sharepoint yielded no results.

Thursday, January 10, 2008 5:48 AM by Dennelle Taylor

# Border Crossing Stats &raquo; Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog : Rolling up &#8230;

PingBack from http://bordercrossingstatsblog.info/microsoft-sharepoint-products-and-technologies-team-blog-rolling-up/

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 11:40 PM by Border Crossing Stats » Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog : Rolling up …

# how to fix sharepoint site usage moss 2007

PingBack from http://nathanial.mediaplusnews.info/howtofixsharepointsiteusagemoss2007.html

Tuesday, May 20, 2008 9:34 AM by how to fix sharepoint site usage moss 2007

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