With SharePoint Designer, connect to the SharePoint site where you want to display the list or library. Navigate within that site structure and open the Web Part page on which you want to display your SharePoint List or Library from a different site. In the menu option Data View, select Insert Data View. In the right-hand Catalogs frame…

Confused yet? If you aren’t familiar with the above steps, they describe the common method of displaying SharePoint Lists and Libraries across sites within SharePoint, an extremely handy but painful feature provided SharePoint. With the SharePoint following growing ever more quickly with the release of SharePoint 2010, the ability to share information across sites is becoming more of a need then a nice-to-have.

Bamboo Solutions has provided a number of products over the years to help cross-site collaboration, including:

• Alert Plus – send email notifications on items created, modified, deleted, when certain column values have changed, and so much more for lists across sites.  Completely customizable email body, with the ability to include any column from the alert list in the message body including the past values.

• Bamboo Lookup Selector – allow users to lookup data across sites, and even provide dependency between columns, i.e., select a value in Column A, and automatically filter Column B (Bamboo Lookup Selector) to display related values.
• Calendar Plus Web Part – display any list or library from any site into several calendar views including Day, Week, Month, Quarter, Year, and Gantt views.  As an added bonus, color-code items for at-a-glance viewing.
• Data-Viewer Web Part – display data from a SharePoint list in a grid view while applying conditional formatting, and the ability to nest a secondary list.
• List Rollup Web Part – far one of Bamboo’s most popular products, providing the ability to aggregate information across sites into a single view.
• List Search Simple Web Part – search lists and libraries across sites for quick information access.

Even with all these great cross-site collaboration products that Bamboo has developed in the past, something was still missing.  In many cases, users simply want to display List and Library views across sites, in the same format they would see if they were on the same site.  Well, I’m happy to report that Bamboo now has the answer with the introduction of the Cross-Site Display Web Part. Now you can display any list or library across sites (and even across site collections) while preserving all the views using an approach similar to WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).

To give you an idea of the product capabilities, here are screenshots of the three most popular List and Library views –

Standard View

Calendar View

Gantt View

View Supported Lists and Libraries for a complete listing of all List and Library types and associated views that are currently supported.

What is even better about Cross-Site Display Web Part is that the Web Part configuration couldn’t be any simpler. No more complicated SharePoint Designer steps to follow or unfamiliar interfaces for users. Just follow the simple steps described in the Online Documentation and you’re good to go:

• How to configure Cross-Site Display Web Part in SharePoint 2007
• How to configure Cross-Site Display Web Part in SharePoint 2010

Ready to give Cross-Site Display Web Part a try? As with all Bamboo products, Cross-Site Display Web Part comes with a fully-functional 30-day trial, so simply open the product page, click  , select the version of SharePoint you are running, and proceed to checkout.