BUT WAIT!!! THERE'S MORE -- Using List Rollup with other Bamboo Web Parts

If I had more free time here at Bamboo, and could do whatever I wanted, I'm pretty sure I'd spend all day making infomercials for our products. Every time I see some horrendously low budget local commercial, all I can think is how much better it would be if it involved Web Parts. 

Personally, I think I'd go with more yelling and screaming, like they used to do with local auto dealers with really cheap financing ("DO YOU HAVE A JOB??? DO YOU HAVE TEN DOLLARS??? DO YOU WANT A NEW CAR???") But I'm absolutely sure which Bamboo Web Part I'd make an ad for first -- the List Rollup Web Part, which to me, is our definitive "BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!!" product.

First of all, List Rollup is great on its own, because it does something almost anyone working with SharePoint immediately needs to do -- it aggregates data from multiple lists, on different sites, and pulls it into a single data view. If you're really digging around for data, it has powerful, adjustable auto-seek options to do the dirty work for you, meaning that it's easy to combine data without having to create and maintain yet another list. In my infomercial, I could probably take up the first 23 minutes or so showing you how to set up List Rollup, how to use it in different scenarios, and of course, every couple of minutes I'd remind you how easy it is to buy it (or in our case, to try it out for free). There would be music, man-on-the-street interviews, and probably juggling. But then, with a few minutes left, I'd break out the big guns.

PERKY HOST : "Well, Dr. Valuegardner, I think we can agree that this is a pretty amazing product, and our audience has really enjoyed learning how easy it is to aggregate data from all across their SharePoint portal with just a few easy steps."

GUY IN LAB COAT {in thick, exaggerated, Austrailian accent} : "Linda, I've had an ABSOLUTE BLAST hanging out with such a GREAT audience today!!! But I bet I know what you're thinking -- I love having access to all of this aggregated data, but what happens when I want to use it in a calendar or a pie chart?"

{crowd grumbles approvingly}

PERKY HOST : "You're exactly right, Doctor, that IS what I was thinking. But how could List Rollup possibly help us with that? 

GUY IN LAB COAT : "Linda, what if I were to tell you that some of Bamboo Solutions most popular Web Parts actually work WITH List Rollup... {looks towards crowd, raises voice}, ... JUST LIKE THEY WERE NORMAL LISTS?"

{applause, oddly violent cheering}

PERKY HOST : "I'd say you better pinch me, because I must be dreaming!!!"

GUY IN LAB COAT {inappropriately overlaughing} : "No need for that, Linda! BECAUSE IT'S REAL!!!!"

{thunderous music, audience gasping, various curtains revealing SharePoint portals rise}

Actually, Dr. Valuegardner isn't kidding, although I'm pretty sure he's not a real doctor. But List Rollup does allow you to connect quickly and easily to a number of Bamboo Web Parts, letting you use List Rollup data in calendars, charts, and more. Here's a look -- I find reading it out loud in Dr. Valuegardner's voice makes it more interesting, but I'll leave that part up to you.

Calendar Plus/Mini Calendar

It takes about five seconds of working with calendar data in SharePoint to realize that being able to access aggregated data is incredibly useful. If you're creating any kind of master calendar -- whether it's to track events from multiple projects/products, deadlines from various departments, or transactions from different team members, you're probably going to want to access data from multiple lists before long. With List Rollup and Calendar Plus (or Mini-Calendar, if you prefer your Calendars to fit in particularly small spaces), it's simple, and with the color coding functionality available in Calendar Plus, it's much easier to quickly scan through a large number of calendar events (which you're more likely to have with aggregated data, of course). 

And since List Rollup can keep all of your column data, the tooltip data functionality included with Calendar Plus is just as useful with List Rollup as it is with standard SharePoint lists; in fact, once you've hooked up to a List Rollup data view, it's easy to forget you're even working with multiple lists in the first place.

Alert Plus

If you're trying to keep track of changes to a SharePoint list, Alert Plus is a great way to do it; it sends automatic e-mail alerts to you whenever specified elements of the List change. Of course, it's pretty unlikely that everything you need to monitor is going to be on one list. Fortunately, Alert Plus can connect to a List Rollup data view, and you can monitor the data there just like a standard list.

The alternative -- creating alerts for each of the lists individually -- works fine, but maintaining all those different alerts can get frustratingly tedious, especially if you're monitoring similar types of data on similarly constructed list. With List Rollup, that data is combined, leaving Alert Plus just one thing to monitor (and leaving you just one alert to configure). 

Chart Plus

When I was first introduced to SharePoint, one of the first things I wanted to do was aggregate data from several lists. The next thing I wanted to do was display that data in a graph -- with Chart Plus, that's exactly what you can do. The way I see it, most charts and graphs are all about providing perspective to whoever's looking at them -- and what kind of perspective do you get when the Chart doesn't show all of your data? So instead, connect Chart Plus to a List Rollup data view, and allow yourself to quickly view truly total stats as bar graphs, pie charts, or any of the display options included with Chart Plus. 

I certainly wasn't the only one with the urge to chart aggregated data -- we actually got the idea from a customer, who wanted the exact same thing, hence the Chart Plus Revolution Pack, which first introduced the feature.

Data-Viewer

If you're wondering why you'd want to connect a List Rollup Data View to something called Data-Viewer, then you're obviously not familiar with the features available in the Data-Viewer Web Part. With Data-Viewer, end users can create their own custom views of List, SQL, or BDC data with in-line (no page reload!) grouping, sorting, and filtering capabilities -- and it all happens in a Web Part, without needing to muck around in the toolpane. At this point, are you even remotely surprised this thing hooks up to List Rollup?

I'm particularly fond of using List Rollup with Data Viewer, because it's the ultimate example of users customizing how data is presented to them without them needing to actually tinker with (read = "break") critical source data. Aggregate data, plug it into Data-Viewer, and drag and drop your brains out until you've got exactly what you want in front of you, all without messing things up for anyone else.

This is Not Some Kind of Rocket Surgery

(ahem) ... BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!! Let's say you create a List Rollup data view, as I did for the screenshots in this blog post. I've got a calendar, a chart, an alert list, and a custom data viewer, and they're all tied to the same data view. Yep -- every data view you create with List Rollup is a lot more valuable than you think, because you can access it multiple times, any number of ways, with other Bamboo Web Parts. And once you've set up a data view, the hard part is over; it couldn't be easier to connect. In fact, let's just go through the steps for most of the Web Parts mentioned here, right now.

1. Open the tool pane
2. Under Data Source, choose List Rollup
3. Enter the URL of the data view and click Connect
4. Choose the data view from the drop-down menu

Done. Now, you just configure the Web Part like you would if you were pulling data from a standard SharePoint list -- except that data is all rolled up for you, and can be mapped to a single chart, calendar, etc. Alert Plus is slightly different, simply because of the way that it works, but the simplicity is the same (you simply enter the URL of the data view when you create the alert). 

So -- List Rollup integration is easy, it's powerful, and it applies to a variety of useful Bamboo Web Parts. Now if I can just convince everyone here to let me sell it for sixty-one easy payments of $9.95, I think this thing might really take off. For now, though, you can check out the free 15-day trial of List Rollup and the other products mentioned here at the Bamboo online store. If you've already got List Rollup, you owe it to yourself to check out these companion products, especially since you've already done the work of setting up the rolled up data views that integrate so easily with them.  

And next time, on Amazing Web Part Discoveries, watch as Dr. Valuegardner unveils what he calls "The Rotisserie Chicken Web Part". I'm pretty sure it will be amazing, and in all likelihood, ludicriously underpriced.