New Advisor Article on Creating List Rollups without Code

I have a new article in this month's Advisor Guide to Microsoft SharePoint on how you can use Access 2003 and the Data View Web Part to display rollups of SharePoint Lists.

Currently, the article is only available in the print version of the magazine, however they usually make the articles available online to subscribers after a month or so. Advisor Guide to Microsoft SharePoint is currently the only print magazine devoted solely to SharePoint Products and Technologies.

Also, I will mention that I will be speaking at the 2nd-ever Advisor Summit on Microsoft SharePoint in Las Vegas on April 9 -13, 2006. I spoke at the inaugural event last year.

At the April conference I will be speaking on the following topics:

1. Creating Dashboards with Office 2003 Web Parts and Components
2. De-mystifying SharePoint Portal Taxonomy Design

If it is on par with last year's event, there will be lots of expert information shared and the venue is fantastic. Plan now to attend!

Feed Monitor Web Part Beta 1

SharePoint Solutions' has released our new Feed Monitor web part for public Beta testing. In creating the Feed Monitor web part, our design goals have been to provide an easy to use, high performance, highly configurable, dynamic experience for consuming syndicated content feeds in SharePoint. The Feed Monitor web part aggregates and presents content from Podcasts, video blogs, RSS, RDF and Atom syndication formats. In addition, the Feed Monitor web part provides a hierarchical catalog of content feed channels based on the OPML specification.

To explore the dynamic, rich user experience provided by SharePoint Solutions’ Feed Monitor web part, visit our public demonstration sites available at the links below:

Sample Collaboration Sites using the Feed Monitor
‘Board of Directors’	‘IT Development Team’

‘Marketing Campaign’	‘Travel Request’

Entertainment Demo Site
‘Entertainment – Home’	‘Entertainment – Music’
‘Entertainment – Movies’	‘Entertainment – Games’

Business Demo Site
‘Business – Home’	‘Business – Stock Market’

Sports Demo Site
‘Sports – Home’	‘Sports – MLB’

Easy to Use

The Feed Monitor configuration and settings interface makes it easy for end users to display content feeds. Users can select from a catalog of available content feed channels, or manually add feed sources of their own.

Highly Configurable

In addition to allowing users to select which specific elements ( such as author, published date, copyright notice, etc. ) of a content feed will be displayed, Feed Monitor also allows CSS compliant inline styles to be applied to each element when the content is presented. With the optional inclusion/exclusion of content elements and the application CSS styles, customization possibilities are endless.

Proxy Support for Fetching Content from Behind Firewalls

Manually configure proxy settings for scenarios where the SharePoint Server exists behind a firewall.

Rich User Experience

The Feed Monitor web part takes advantage of SharePoint’s asynchronous data fetching and web part caching technolgies to provide end users with a high performance, rich user experience. Users can set the caching duration manually.

To participate in the public Beta of SharePoint Solutions’ Feed Monitor web part, visit the Feed Monitor Beta Program page for further information.