Funny choice for a headline, I know, but it’s just been of those AWESOME weeks for me.  Let me give you some background.  Here at Bamboo, we have many departments, all working very closely from start to finish to provide the SharePoint community with the best third-party components on the market today. To make this a truly successful endeavor, you need to make sure everyone always has the most up-to-date information… which is where our portal, built on SharePoint 2010 (naturally) comes in.  Each department manages their daily activities in their own dedicated sites (even the products themselves each have their own Project Management Central sites).

So, dedicated PM Central product sites aside,  you might be wondering where the dog food comes in, and especially the eating of it . Well, the Bamboo Product Management Group (PMG for short) creates guides for our Sales and Support teams to provide them with the necessary information to ensure smoothest possible experience when selling and supporting our individual components, applications, and Suites. PMG, however wanted to maintain control of these documents to make sure that our colleagues always have the latest guides with most current information, but how could we provide our teams with easy access to the information without requiring them to navigate all over the portal? Cue “eating our own dog food.”

Thankfully, Bamboo has already developed a simple yet effective tool called Cross-Site Display Web Part. With Cross-Site Display Web Part, users can quickly display any list or library (including different views like Standard, Calendar, and Gantt views) from one site onto another in minutes. Using SharePoint item-level security out-of-the-box, other departments can now access PMG’s guides directly from their own portal site, just as if they were on the list itself!

Another success story this week involves an improvement to our product documentation.  Using the SharePoint Issues list, we track Documentation Bugs submitted our various departments.  Since this bug list is managed our Technical Writers, the list naturally resides in the Technical Writers’ portal site. Our support team requires the ability to not only access the list, but to add items as well. Using the Cross-Site Display Web Part, within minutes we were able to provide access to not one but two lists from different sites in the Support team’s central home page, saving Support engineers valuable time navigating to separate sites to do their job. 

Do you have a success story using one of Bamboo’s products?  Please share with us in the comments below!

Interested in giving Cross-Site Display Web Part a try? Jump over to the product page and click Add Trial to Cart from the product banner to download a fully-functional 30-day trial today!