SharePoint Content Aggregation Tasks

Within this blog post, we will explore how to aggregate SharePoint Task lists from across multiple site collections using the Lightning Conductor Web Part. The Lightning Conductor Web Part provides an experience whereby users can configure their own displays of SharePoint content along with conditional formatting.

First, we will create a new view within an existing Lightning Conductor Web Part instance. This enables us to have multiple views of content displayed on the same page without causing performance issues or taking up too much of the page.

1. Click Create View from the web part drop down list
2. Select Create View.
3. Under the Web Part Tab, Name the View ‘SharePoint Tasks’. You could always provide some more interesting views such as ‘Tasks Assigned To Me’ or ‘Tasks Due Today’ etc.
4. Set the scope of the rollup by choosing the Lists, Sites or Site Collections that you want to include within your query.

Next, we will design our view. Under the Column tab, we can select the columns from the Task list type that we would like to display. Custom columns will also be available for selection should you want to use them.

1. Click the Column Tab
2. Select the columns that you desire such as: Task Name, Start Date, End Data, Priority, Task Status, Percentage Complete.
3. Apply data formatting to each column such as ‘Short Date’ for the Start Date column, and Percent for the Percentage Complete.

A few other things you might want to do here include Grouping by multiple levels, apply conditional formatting, filtering, and Add Calculated Columns to your view.

1. Add a calculated column by clicking the Add calculated column link. An example calculation is: ([DueDate].Value-[StartDate].Value).TotalDays
2. You can add filtering by clicking on the filter icon. An example would be Assigned To = ‘Me’ to show the tasks assigned to the logged on user.
3. You may also add conditional formatting to show High Priority Tasks within a different colour.

After a few minutes of configuring settings, you’ll have a great looking content aggregation with conditional formatting and all of your SharePoint Tasks within a single view. Note, that you can jump back and fourth to the Calendar View we created in yesterday post by selecting the View menu.

Please see the full configuration in a 5 minute video below. Or if you wish, download a trial of the Lightning Conductor Web Part or Lightning Conductor Add-In for SharePoint Online.