The Whats New Web Part for SharePoint
Published 07/13 courtesy of Bamboo Solutions Community
For the third time in as many weeks, a SharePoint Blank Mailbag investigation has ended up leading me to a solution on CodePlex. Good thing CodePlex is a community initiative, else I might have to start worrying about people thinking I'm on the take! Today's question highlights what strikes me as a particularly useful feature request regarding automatic notification of what's changed within a given SharePoint site:
Is it possible to have information on the Home Page that lists everything that has changed on the site over the last xx period of time? I'm assuming it would be a Web Part?
My first instinct was to try and get the Content Query Web Part to accomplish this, as that would represent an out-of-the-box solution (albeit one available exclusively to MOSS users), but those tests didn't meet with success. Which is not to say that someone else couldn't get it to work as desired, but I wasn't able to get around the apparent fact that a single List Type must be specified in the Content Query Web Part (i.e., there's no "All Lists" option to return a greater array of results). Since I hit that wall, I didn't go much further down that road, but the apparent inability to specify xx days within the filtering options would also seem to limit the functionality of the Content Query Web Part as a solution to this problem.
So, after a quick double-check that Bamboo doesn't offer a Web Part which solves the problem (we don't), it was time to consult Google the All-Knowing. That consultation quickly revealed that one Jan Tielens had developed what he dubbed the What's New Web Part for SharePoint 2003 and, by popular demand, Jan updated the Web Part with new functionality for SharePoint 2007 (WSS and MOSS) and has made it available as a free CodePlex download.
The What's New Web Part, which "can display a list of recently added or changed items of a SharePoint site or site collection," is one of the SmartTools for SharePoint, a collection of extensions available on CodePlex. Version 1.2 of the What's New Web Part is the latest build available for download, and the rich feature set includes a configurable number of new/changed items to show in the Web Part. From the description, there doesn't appear to be the ability to specify xx days for the range of results, but the ability to specify the number of results returned by the What's New Web Part strikes me as an elegant solution which would likely serve to get the job done in a majority of cases.
I'm relying on the description for now because I'm going to need a hand from my Sys Admin to complete the installation of the Web Part on my test area before I'll be able to actually get my own hands dirty with the Web Part configuration. I'll be coming at you next time with my findings, however, complete with screenshots of the Web Part in action.
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