This week we are highlighting a remarkable product we have here at Bamboo® called List Rollup. List Rollup is our content aggregation tool that allows you to combine list data from anywhere in SharePoint®. This product is the definition of collaboration when it comes to SharePoint – but it doesn’t stop as a standalone product. List Rollup allows you to connect quickly and easily to a number of Bamboo Web Parts, letting you use aggregated list data in calendars, charts, and more. We will be releasing a series of blog posts this week highlighting these product pairings. Today, we start with List Rollup and Calendar Plus.

If you have ever seen our Calendar Plus web part, you may have noticed the immediate difference to out-of-the-box SharePoint calendars. Some of the top features include the ability to color-code your items by category (or any column in your list, really), a configurable tooltip that allows you to show as little or as much data right on the calendar (eliminating the need for an extra click), and the ability to easily navigate right back to the calendar page when you close out of an item form (seriously, SharePoint, why?). These features alone make a compelling case to show immediate ROI on an intuitive web part such as Calendar Plus.

But when you put List Rollup and Calendar Plus together, even more, amazing things can happen:

1. You can “rollup” lists that have been aggregated across sites and site collections and display that information in one, single, beautiful, color-coded calendar.

2. You can bypass the 10 list limit in SharePoint by displaying a list rollup list that has aggregated data from across as many lists as you need.

3. Using List Rollup’s auto-discovery feature, you can configure the list to automatically add newly created lists that fit the criteria straight to Calendar Plus, making it virtually a maintenance-free calendar after the initial setup.

4. You can also set the filter controls on auto-discovery to only include lists of a specific type and/or location if you so choose.

I rely on this powerful combination every day at work on our corporate portal. We’re a tight-knit group here at Bamboo, but I can’t say that we want full access to everyone’s business all the time, so asking all of my colleagues to share their Outlook calendars with me would be overkill. Instead, we’ve streamlined the calendar on our Corporate portal to show the relevant people all of the relevant data, and not all the other “junk”. Here it is, folks, welcome to the world of Bamboo!

Connecting our calendar to a List Rollup list, we have aggregated event lists from our HR site, our Marketing site, and our Engineering site to display on one corporate calendar. This shows items from our corporate events list, marketing tradeshow list, product release list, our corporate holiday list, and our scheduled vacation list, all in one place, with a simple legend explaining the colors and categories.

So now, before I’m ready to set a timeline for a new project that will involve multiple stakeholders, I first consult this calendar to make sure that:

a) My team members aren’t out on vacation or at a trade show.

b) That we don’t have a large product release scheduled that I know will take away some key resources.

c) That I’m not supposed to be planning a trip home to visit the family, because I forgot that we had a three-day weekend!

If you too can see the value of this dynamic duo for your organization, my suggestion is to download your free trials of Calendar Plus and List Rollup today and see for yourself how easy it is to get organized. Contact Us,  you won’t regret it!

Tomorrow, we talk about Charts, yippee!!!!  Stay tuned…